Thinking on software identity, agentic development, and the engineering decisions that persist.
Every company eventually repositions. Marketing updates the website in days. Sales starts pitching the new story in weeks. The codebase is still what it was yesterday. Here's how to close the gap between what your company says it is and what the software actually does.
The sharpest objection to identity engineering is that you can't formally verify code against natural-language constraints. That's true. It's also irrelevant. Every quality mechanism in software is probabilistic. Reconciliation just needs to be better than nothing.
Everyone's talking about AI code quality. The actual problem is cognitive debt, verification debt, and architectural debt, and your linter can't catch any of them.
The first wave of vibe-coded startups is hitting a wall. The survivors won't be the ones who abandoned AI. They'll be the ones who defined what their software is before they let AI build it.
AI is making rewrites cheap. But 70% still fail. The code is disposable. The contracts are not.
Your most valuable asset walks out the door every evening. Some nights it doesn't come back. The cost of undocumented institutional knowledge is enormous -- and invisible.
The bug isn't in the code. It's in the gap between what is and what should be. And nobody's filing that ticket.
AI-assisted coding is linked to 4x more code cloning. Refactoring collapsed from 25% to under 10%. Your codebase has three patterns for the same operation.
Werner Vogels coined verification debt. Addy Osmani coined comprehension debt. 96% of developers don't trust AI output, but only 48% verify it. That gap has a name now.
Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year. Y Combinator's favorite approach. And the fastest way to build software you can't maintain.
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