About Hard Stuff

Hard Stuff is essays on engineering work that doesn’t fit the conversations most engineering publications are having. The structural conditions of software development. What changes when implementation stops being the bottleneck. The decisions engineers used to make and don’t anymore, and why those decisions are coming back. The work that gets harder the longer nobody talks about it.

The argument is usually more diagnostic than prescriptive. The voice is more direct than diplomatic. If you want optimism about AI, this isn’t the publication. If you want career advice that flatters you, also not this. The posts are for engineers who’d rather understand what’s actually happening than be told it’ll be fine.

I’m a platform and release engineer working across security, infrastructure, and product engineering. I also run Atlas Crew, where I build security tooling and career-intelligence software. The work I write about is the work I’m doing: multi-agent development workflows on production codebases at scale, the structural shifts in how engineering organizations produce software, the parts of the discipline that don’t get written down because they’re learned by surviving them. I’ve inherited dead frameworks where Google couldn’t save you. I’ve built greenfield systems alone with three to six agents running in parallel. I have opinions and I’m willing to be wrong about them in public.