Engineering Manager / Technical Lead
A topic hub collecting every article tagged Developer Productivity. Use it to explore related posts and follow this theme across the site.
14 articles
LLMs finish tasks when you show them the way first. The human almost always holds more context than the model, so an open-ended request is a maze of guesses — while an anticipated path of steps, constraints, and checks turns wandering into walking. Here's why rules, skills, and scaffolding are all the same trick.
Two vendors call their product an ADE and they do not even agree on what the A stands for — yet Warp, Orca, Cursor, Google, GitHub, herdr and cmux converged on the same primitives anyway. A source-backed look at the three tiers, what is marketing, and which primitives your repo actually needs.
Spec Kit fans a small change out into eight-plus files. Four practical levers — inline prompts, lean templates, trimmed commands, and impact-based routing — make its specs, plans, and tasks shorter without breaking the workflow.
Modern production apps require many layers to maintain. A prompt-first repository adds instructions, skills, MCP, and bounded loops so agents can move faster without bypassing reliability controls.
A prompt-engineering teardown of Spec Kit's six core skills—and a practical blueprint for building an opinionated company spec workflow with custom Agent Skills.
A practical guide for engineers on when nit comments help, when they become review noise, and how many are enough before a team should automate, approve, or move the discussion out of the PR.
A practical research-backed guide to building a senior-engineer agent that plans work, writes structured subagent prompts, orchestrates execution, and opens pull requests, plus an honest map of the gaps, assumptions, and confidence needed for trustworthy auto-PRs.
AI can generate most of the code. It still cannot decide what to build, sense when 'correct-looking' output is quietly wrong, or own the consequences. A field guide to the tasks that stay human — for engineers and PMs.
A practical guide for engineers and PMs who want to improve daily AI-agent work by auditing instructions, skills, subagents, tools, and review habits.
Spec Kit jumps straight to specify. Borrow two missing phases from OpenSpec-style workflows — an Explore mode and an Alternatives-Review mode — as two small extension commands, without forking or switching tools.
AI can help teams move faster, but the real unlock is designing agents, skills, evals, traces, and self-correction loops around your app.
AI is changing the center of gravity in software engineering: less manual typing, more specification, validation, system design, and human judgment.
AI makes first-draft code cheaper, but it does not erase ambiguity, integration, verification, coordination, or production risk. That means engineering complexity has to be discussed differently, especially in Scrum planning.
AI isn't just making engineers faster — it's changing what engineering means. Here's what that shift looks like, and why the best days for software teams are still ahead.
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