writing · tag
Leadership
13 posts tagged “Leadership.”
What to Put in an AI Vendor Contract Before You Sign
Price caps, exit rights, data ownership, model-swap notice. The clauses that decide whether you're a customer or a hostage when your AI vendor changes the deal.
Read →Your Engineers Aren't Resisting AI. They're Afraid of It.
Your team isn't resisting AI out of laziness. They're afraid of being blamed for code they didn't write. The 70/30 method draws the line that makes adoption feel safe.
Read →Job Descriptions for Agents: A Template
The single highest-leverage thing you can do for an AI agent is write it a real job description before you deploy it. Here's the template we use, with every field explained.
Read →What Happens When Your AI Vendor Triples the Price?
Agent software spend is exploding and pricing is unstable. Here's how to architect so a vendor's price hike or a deprecated model can't hold your product hostage.
Read →What a Manager's Job Becomes When Agents Do the Work
If agents do the producing, what's left for the manager? The job doesn't shrink. It moves up: setting the standard, designing the system, and owning the judgment.
Read →Do You Need to Hire an AI Engineer, or Just Rent the Judgment?
The full-time ML hire everyone reaches for vs. what most early teams actually need. How to tell which problem you really have before you spend the headcount.
Read →How to Spot an AI Expert Who's Faking It
A founder's vetting checklist for AI consultants, agencies, and hires — the questions that separate real operators from prompt-jockeys with a good deck.
Read →The Agentic OS Maturity Model: 5 Stages
Most teams have no idea how far along they actually are with AI. Here are the five stages from one-off prompting to a real Agentic OS, and how to tell which one you're in.
Read →Who's Accountable When the Agent Is Wrong?
Every leader weighing AI eventually hits the real question: when the agent makes a costly mistake, who owns it? If the honest answer is no one, you're not ready to ship.
Read →5 Signs It's Time to Bring in a Fractional CTO
Five signals it's time for a fractional CTO — from becoming the technical bottleneck to shipping AI that won't survive production. None are about headcount.
Read →When to Fire an Agent (and Hand the Work Back to a Human)
Everyone talks about deploying agents. Almost nobody talks about pulling one. Knowing when to take an agent off a job is a core management skill, not an admission of failure.
Read →Giving an Agent a Performance Review
Evals sound like an engineering chore. They're really the management ritual you already run: a regular, honest look at whether the work is good enough. Here's how to run one for an agent.
Read →Your First AI Agent Is a New Hire. Onboard It Like One.
Your AI agent isn't failing because the model is weak. You skipped its onboarding. Give it a job description, access, context, and a feedback loop like any new hire.
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