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DrinkBird is a blog about engineering leadership: the craft of building software and the craft of leading the people who build it. The essays below are a good place to start.

If you only read three

• The bottleneck AI just moved: Generative AI speeds up a step that was rarely the constraint, while piling pressure on the ones that always were. (May 2026)
• Your org chart might be your biggest architectural constraint: How structure, incentives and collaboration shape the systems we build. (July 2025)
• You can’t threaten your way to effective engineering: Effective systems are engineered through sound judgment and deliberate decisions. Fear undermines both at the root. (July 2025)

Engineering leadership

• The $2M bug that wasn’t in the code: Why engineers who master Organizational Behavior outbuild, outinnovate, and outlast everyone else.
• The Remote Engineer’s Playbook: What it takes to succeed in remote work without losing the room.
• The Prisoner’s Dilemma: How self-interest can undermine a group’s outcome.

AI and engineering

• Why AI speed won’t save your system: AI accelerates code creation, but engineering still depends on clarity and deliberate decisions.
• The bottleneck AI just moved: A Theory-of-Constraints reading of what AI has actually done to our throughput.

Communication

• Breaking the Curse of Knowledge: Why experts struggle to teach what they know, and what to do about it.
• The Inverted Pyramid of Problem-Solving: A structure for working through hard problems without losing your way.

The craft

• The worst mistake of many software startups: On structural quality, professionalism, and why “ship fast” is not the whole answer.
• Bursting the Bubble of Ego: On the habit of code review, and why it’s one of the highest-leverage things a team can build.

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leadership · ai · architecture · craft · career · books

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