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.
12 articles
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.
Quick find
Search by topic, title, framework, or pattern.