The Tacit Dimension
Christian Ekrem's 'The Tacit Dimension' carries Polanyi's 'we can know more than we can tell' into software engineering. He's right that experience works that way. Knowledge doesn't, and the essay never separates the two.
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Jordan Lord's "Three Constraints Before Building"
Jordan Lord lays out three constraints he applies before building anything: a one-page description that survives without padding, a piece of core tech that can outlive the product, and a single defining constraint that shapes the user experience. Scope, leverage, and identity - one filter each. Great stuff.
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The Wrong Unit
The "10x engineer" may be a real phenomenon, in that some people really do vastly outperform their peers along certain metrics, but "10x output" is the wrong thing to optimize for: you want to find the people who create exponential output for the whole team. AI makes this kind of optimization urgent, because these people not only help their team members, but curtail the worst aspects of AI aid, too.
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Trust is Not An Opinion
Most teams don't trust their code - they trust the people who wrote it, or the streak of days without incident. That's not the same thing, and the difference is becoming harder to ignore. Trust in a system isn't social capital or accumulated momentum: it's demonstrated, repeatedly and verifiably, by the system itself. If you have to read the code to know it works, you don't know it works.
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