ways-of-working

Code is cheap. Show me the talk argues that the ability to think clearly, communicate problems, and architect solutions matters far more than the ability to write code itself.

Addy Osmani’s LLM coding workflow going into 2026 appears very similar to my own, though an interesting note on articles like this is that the reader can interpret the language used in different ways. Claude Code has an excellent /plan capability that Opus 4.5 excels on. I do plan, and I do write specs from time to time, but I also one-shot and two-shot changes and my actual development looks like a mixture of these. At no time do i generate pages and pages of specs and then have the LLM embark on a long horizon delivery period and not look at the code it wrote. Addy points out in anther post the importance of understanding the code with ideas like:

If you skip review, you don’t eliminate work - you defer it

And also links to another article noting that skipping review results in:

No consistency, no overarching plan. It’s like I’d asked 10 junior-mid developers to work on this codebase, with no Git access, locking them in a room without seeing what the other 9 were doing

This is inline with my findings and against a popular (hype) argument that an increase in code volume due to LLMs needs to be accompanied with a decrease in human-in-the-loop because speed. This is a drop in quality, which is deferred until your customer’s are affected and your DORA metrics deteriorate.

If I did read this in 2012 when it was leaked then I’ve completely forgotten. Valve’s (2012) Employee Handbook includes a section on stack ranking.

Some really basic tables that help illustrate the benefit of reducing work in progress.

Every team is at a different stage of collaboration and so it’s difficult to find a team charter template that fits all teams - I like this atlassian one even if just for the Team Preferences and Communication Channels sections.

Jeff Sutherland on Acceptance Test Driven Development suggests that estimating tasks will slow you down.