Candace
Building the human and operational infrastructure that makes AI work.
Most of us building with AI are consistly wondering if we're solving the wrong problem. We optimize individual tasks, but then realize we should be writing semi-autonomous agent. The reality is a paradigm shift: we should be redesigning how humans and systems collaborate. I've spent the last few years focused on building workflows, rethinking cadences, and constructing new operational frameworks that turn AI capability into outcomes. But the truth is, we are all just getting started. We're better served focusing on how the virtual machine in our own head is evolving to address the seismic changes, not on any given stopping point.
This inflection point is a generational one (all puns intended), and not one I can watch from a distance. The map below is how I think about this work, organized around the human, technical, and organizational structures that give meaning to movement.
Humans
Building teams that think clearly about systems—hiring for judgment, designing roles that evolve.
Hands-on technical staff are your best bet to become your next AI technical staff. They're positioned for it. But more than that: they have the mindset.
AI interaction is intense. Two people with different predilections will set up evals, constitutions, and frameworks very differently—and end up with very different results.
AI
Deploying AI as operational infrastructure—across automation, augmentation, and agentic systems.
Google's open source model and what it signals about the next 18 months of the stack.
AI models are fundamentally stateless. It's the harnessing around them that makes them useful.
Without evals you don't have engineering, you have vibes. The discipline travels.
Tech Industry
The industry is bifurcating between AI-native builds and legacy retrofits. I have opinions about which survives.
Code is being generated at 10x, but the software factory that safely moves intent to production wasn't built for it.
What I consume
- Claire Vo — YouTube channel
- Lenny Rachitsky — Product writing & podcast
- Stratechery — Ben Thompson on tech strategy
- AI Explained — YouTube channel