Engineering the Future

Hi, I'm Royce. A pragmatic builder focused on solving real user needs.

Posts

Browse writing grouped by month or filter to find something specific.

36 posts published

April 2026

9 posts

AI in April 2026: The Compute Crunch and the Platform Wars

A roundup of April 2026's most important AI developments. GitHub pauses Copilot signups, Anthropic ships Opus 4.7 and Project Glasswing, Google unveils dual TPU v8 at Cloud Next, OpenAI lands on AWS, and SpaceX takes an option on Cursor.

Every Team Needs an AI Builder

Top-down AI mandates create pressure but rarely deliver change. The teams getting AI right have a builder embedded inside them, automating one task at a time.

Ideas Over Hierarchy

The best companies are not run by the most senior person in the room. They are run by whoever has the best idea.

Skills vs CLI vs MCP: Which Do You Pick for AI Agents?

A practical guide to choosing between Skills, CLI, and MCP when giving tools to your AI agents.

Why You Should Aim for Zero Support for Your Products

If users need a support team to figure out your product, the product is the problem. Every ticket is a UX bug in disguise.

From Prompt Engineering to Context Engineering to Harness Engineering

The discipline of working with LLMs has evolved through three distinct phases. Each one moved the locus of value further from the model and closer to the system around it.

Why People Resist Change (And How to Work Around It)

Resistance is rarely about the idea. It is about loss, autonomy, and who gets to be the author. What the research says about working with it, not against it.

Every Employee Gets an AI Teammate

Meta, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Deloitte, Shopify, and more are giving every employee their own AI teammates. The question has shifted from 'should we use AI' to 'what does each person's AI team look like?'

If Code Is No Longer the Moat, What Is?

Writing software used to be slow and expensive. That is what made it feel like a moat. Now code is cheap, and the real sources of defensibility are somewhere else entirely.

February 2026

10 posts

AI in February 2026: Swarms, Selloffs, and Consolidation

A roundup of February 2026's most important AI developments, including agent swarms, trillion-dollar selloffs, industry consolidation, and a record wave of new models.

Which AI Model Should You Actually Use?

A practical guide comparing Gemini, Claude, GPT, Grok, and open weight models across use cases, pricing, and real world tradeoffs.

PowerPoint Is Not a Strategy. $30 Billion Lesson from Starbucks.

Starbucks lost $30 billion under a McKinsey-trained CEO. What this tells us about execution, culture, and why the smartest strategy means nothing without the people to carry it out.

How to Overcome the Curse of Knowledge

Why the more you know, the harder it becomes to explain what you know. And what the research says about fixing it.

When Software Is Commoditised, What Is the Value of Low-Code/No-Code?

AI can now write code faster and cheaper than ever. Low-code platforms promised to make software creation accessible. When both solve the same problem, where does each one fit?

End-to-End Agentic AI in the Enterprise: What It Actually Takes

I explore what business leaders and technical teams each need to contribute to make end-to-end agentic AI work in enterprise settings.

Hyper Productivity but at What Cost

AI is driving productivity at incredible speed. But the relationship between AI tools and actual time savings is more complex than it appears.

Software Engineering to Outcome Engineering

Tools like Claude Code have shifted the role of software engineers from writing code to architecting agents that deliver outcomes. The field is being redefined.

The World Is Changing and the Market Has Priced It In

Anthropic's Claude Cowork and OpenAI's Frontier launched back to back. Nearly $1 trillion in software stocks vanished in a week. Let's look at what actually happened and why it matters.

Lessons from Toyota: Looms to Cars and How It Applies to AI

What Toyota's jump from textiles to cars teaches us about the current AI moment.