Engineering Culture

I mandated AI tooling across my engineering org expecting faster code. I got faster code. It was the least interesting thing that happened.

Here is the thing I got wrong, and I got it wrong in the most ordinary way possible: I thought the bottleneck was typing.

An AI agent will hand you two hundred lines in ninety seconds, and it will look plausible. The risk is not that the code is bad; it is that confident, unreviewable work arrives faster than anyone can catch it. CasaFlow is our answer: a staged pipeline of Claude Code skills, built on Duro's open-source Jig, that walks a piece of work from brainstorm to merged PR and leaves a durable artifact at every step.

The parts that matter most sit between the stages. One gate makes you explain what the last stage produced before the next one opens; the other demands evidence before anything gets called done. Neither cares whether you are a person or an agent. Process stops being a tax on the work and becomes exhaust from it.

Releases used to have a single point of failure, and it was me. The process was ad hoc and quietly nerve-wracking, the kind of thing where you clear your afternoon and hope. Nobody wanted to own it, so it fell to the person with the most access and the most to lose.

What fixed it is unglamorous underneath: staged environments, automated checks, human approval gates, git as the source of truth. On top sits a deadpan British rail announcer calling stations, a steam whistle on departure, a bell at Production Terminal, and delays attributed to leaves on the line. The whimsy is not decoration. It is the adoption strategy, and it is why rotating ownership stuck.