Travis BoudreauxLet’s Talk

Articles

2026

  1. Agentic Engineering Requires One More Shift LeftSecurity shifted left into CI a decade ago. The authoring moved into the agent harness, and the gates are following.
  2. Hire where failure is expensiveAgents made feature work cheap. The scarce skill you can screen for is judgment in the domains where a wrong model output costs an outage, a breach, or a regulator.
  3. The agentic maturity ladder"Do you use AI?" stopped discriminating a year ago. "Show me your loop" separates engineers across a six-level scale.
  4. Taskmaxxing > TokenmaxxingThe per-token price is a proxy. The real KPI is cost per completed task.

2025

  1. Evals > VibesAgent skills are code now. Almost nobody tests them, and the few honest measurements should worry you.
  2. Feeling is the moatWhen AI makes every feature cheap to copy, what's defensible in consumer software is how it makes people feel.
  3. Agent readiness is engineering discipline with a deadlineThe checklist for agent-ready codebases is the same one we've ignored for twenty years. What changed is the cost of ignoring it.

2023

  1. Postmortem the Near MissAn engineering organization that only reviews customer-facing outages is running on luck. Unexamined close calls train teams to become more reckless by mistaking fortunate timing for architectural resilience.
  2. Hiring talent from emerging markets is challengingWhy hiring from the first wave of a hot industry is harder than it looks, and how to tell surfers from swimmers.

2021

  1. Build Proprietary. Buy Commodity.Every line of code is an ongoing operational liability. Building custom commodity software is no longer an engineering flex but a capital allocation error.