RootStone Partners
Executive Engineering Advisory
A post making the rounds argues, with real conviction and a memorable line, that you should never review AI-written code. Ever. It leans on a 2026 Faros AI study of 22,000 developers and 4,000 teams that found, as AI adoption rose inside th...
Continue readingA new generation of AI development tools has arrived, and most organizations are still treating them as a slightly better autocomplete. That framing quietly caps the return. These tools are not faster typing. They are coordination engines,...
Continue readingFew decisions shape an engineering organization's cost structure more than build versus buy, and few are made with less rigor. The default answer, for good reasons, has long been "buy." But the reasoning behind that default is worth underst...
Continue readingAI code generation is being adopted faster than it is being measured. The early results look excellent, which is exactly why the second act catches so many organizations off guard. If you are deciding whether to invest, it helps to understa...
Continue readingEvery technology decision is a bet on how fast your business will be able to move in a year. Most of these decisions are made for engineering reasons, such as what is interesting or new, and their business consequences only become visible l...
Continue readingCode review gets treated as the place where quality happens. It is really the place where quality is confirmed. By the time a change reaches review, most of what determines its quality, how well the work was defined, how it was sized, and t...
Continue readingWhen delivery slips, the instinct is to look for a technical cause. More often the real problem is alignment: the business and the engineering organization are optimizing for different things and no one is translating between them. Closing...
Continue readingOne of the most expensive habits in software rarely looks expensive at the time. An engineer decides the standard, well-supported way of doing something is not clever enough and builds a custom solution instead. It feels like craftsmanship....
Continue readingWhen I was brought in to manage backend and platform engineering at Grand Canyon Education, the team said it was Agile. In practice it was running Agile theater on top of a command-and-control culture. In six months we doubled its velocity...
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