Agents have become a second consumer of your platform—a shadow persona that reads your documentation, invokes your APIs, and often becomes the first interface between your platform and the developer. Most platforms aren't designed for this. The ones that adapt will define the next era of developer e...
Structured output from agents is easy to generate and hard to trust. Self-correction closes the loop—exposing validation interfaces that let agents generate, validate, and converge on outputs that satisfy constraints.
Agents introduce a new human-computer interaction paradigm—partial autonomy. Partial autonomy is defined as a system that can plan, take action within bounds, and own the outcomes. This new paradigm demands a new design discipline—Agentic Experience Design.
Understanding a constraint and being bound by a constraint are independent properties. Current agentic systems collapse this distinction—treating trained understanding as enforcement. Topological restrictions on the latent space can make constraint-violating states structurally unrepresentable, clos...
Most prisons don't look like prisons—they look like common sense and policy. They form when ideas built to help us coordinate harden into rules no one questions. The way out is learning which rules come from reality and which ones we made up.
How information asymmetry shaped history—from Sun Tzu's spy networks to Ultra decrypts, from the Rothschilds' courier pigeons to modern market manipulation. The mechanisms changed but the principle remained constant: those who controlled information flows controlled outcomes.
Where Machiavelli's Prince teaches power through control, The Peasant teaches influence through enablement. Drive change from any position by giving others the navigation tools—time and information—that oppressive systems suppress.
A novel application of Entropic Gap measurement to human cognitive assessment. By treating human cognition as an information processing system, we can detect performance degradation before it leads to critical errors.
Context pollution measures the semantic distance between a user's original intent and an agent's current working context. When that distance grows unchecked, the agent drifts outside its authority—optimizing away from the user's intent while appearing to function normally.
Discover the Friction Economy—a hidden force reshaping B2B SaaS. Learn how unnoticed user frustrations drive market disruption and why your retention metrics might be masking critical vulnerabilities.
Context management is the practice of designing and maintaining the informational environment agents plan within. When that environment is coherent, agents maintain alignment and continuity over time; when it degrades, drift follows.
As model capabilities become commoditized, the quality of your context architecture determines success. Understanding how leaky prompts create context pollution is essential for building agentic systems that maintain focus and deliver consistent value.
Learn how user frustration drives B2B SaaS disruption through Jobs to be Done, Frustration Coalitions, and Blue Ocean Strategy—and why AI makes every incumbent vulnerable.
A quantifiable metric that measures trapped user frustration in B2B SaaS. When NPS drops but churn stays flat, Sii = ((100-NPS)/Churn) reveals the accumulating pressure that predicts competitive displacement before revenue impact.
Learn how frustrated users organize into coalitions that drive mass B2B SaaS churn. Discover early warning signs and prevention strategies before customers leave.
An observational framework for predicting and preventing mass B2B SaaS customer defection. Learn how frustrated users organize into coalitions that drive switching decisions, why stable usage with declining NPS signals maximum risk, and how PLG accelerates coalition formation from months to weeks.
Why stable usage with declining NPS is the most dangerous pattern in B2B SaaS. How trapped users become exodus events when PLG competitors offer escape routes.
To measure top-of-funnel growth effectively, I've developed a strategy focusing on three key metrics: New Developer Acquisition, Activation Rate, and Time-to-Value. This approach provides insights into developer reach, engagement, and value discovery while aligning efforts across marketing, develope...
Discover how systems thinking and recognizing invisible work can transform DevRel teams. Learn to improve reporting, refine roles, and create aligned career paths for greater impact.
Discover how the 'Drop, Defer, Delegate' method can transform your decision-making process. Learn to prioritize effectively and boost productivity in fast-paced environments.
Learn how to balance execution and communication in long-term product initiatives. Insights from some my work on Slack's web presence unification project reveal strategies for maintaining momentum and support throughout multi-phase projects.
Discover the perils of 'Keystoning' in tech teams, where knowledge hoarding creates single points of failure. Learn to identify keystones, dismantle knowledge silos, and build more resilient, collaborative teams. Essential reading for managers and team members alike.
Dive into the theory-practice spectrum of learning styles and discover how to create developer education that meets learners where they are. From documentation deep-divers to code-first experimenters, learn how to cater to every anyone's learning style.
Long-running knowledge extraction systems degrade as drift, stale context, and conversational noise accumulate. Context management preserves coherence over time, keeping interviews, skill capture, and heuristic extraction aligned with the knowledge the system is trying to surface.
Discover Lava Leadership: Learn how strategic thinkers can drive organizational change from below. Explore challenges, strategies, and the power of bottom-up innovation.
As AI becomes increasingly powerful and pervasive, a crucial question emerges: Who will control this technology and reap its benefits? The answer to this question will have significant implications for innovation, economic opportunity, and the future of work. That's why democratizing AI - making it ...
The YAP (Yet Another Program) mental model illustrates the challenges faced by cross-functional teams as they increase the number of initiatives or programs they manage.
In Developer Relations (DevRel), success isn't just about engaging developers—it's about how well your efforts align with and amplify the work of other departments. The key to unlocking DevRel's full potential lies in seamless cross-functional alignment, regardless of whether your company uses a tra...
In the fast-paced world of Developer Relations (DevRel), there's a phenomenon I like to call YAP - Yet Another Program. It's a challenge that many DevRel teams face as they grow and expand their initiatives. But what exactly is YAP, and how can we counter it? Let's dive in.
In Developer Relations, we often find ourselves at the intersection of multiple disciplines, requiring input and expertise from various teams across the organization. However, the reality is that these cross-functional teams may not always have the bandwidth to provide timely support. This is where ...
As Developer Advocates, a significant amount of our work involves asking people for things. Whether we're trying to get buy-in internally or working on collaborations externally, we're generally in the business of asking. Learn how to get better results from your requests by rethinking the nature of...
Over the last three months, we've been developing a framework at Apollo called DX Audits to help us identify, document, report, and address product friction. Our team and company is growing quickly and it was becoming increasingly difficult to address product friction. We wanted a framework that wou...
Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the idea of having to create that next blog post or YouTube video? Do you find yourself unable to finish things because you're not quite sure when to call it done? Are you adjusting your outlines or talking points on the fly? Learn how to create content more effecti...
As developer advocates, avoid becoming extensions of other teams by closely learning metrics: the different types you'll encounter and when to use them, which are trusted and untrusted, and how to build them effectively to support your team's goals.
There are many reasons that decision-makers may not act upon the feedback we deliver. Still, one thing we can always ask ourselves is, did I get enough buy-in before I asked them to commit? In this post, I'll cover what buy-in is, how it applies to developer advocacy, what skills help the most when ...
How many developers do you know who have left their job because either 1) the work is no longer challenging / there is no career growth, or 2) the work is too challenging, and they have no support? Challenge plays an essential role in our happiness.
Have you ever said to yourself, I wish I was as smart as that person? I know I certainly have! Impostor syndrome is something that I continue to battle even 10 years into my development journey.