Act I
Decide
Find the person who actually hurts, take apart the ticket you were handed, and shrink the work until it fits.
- Know who you are building for
- Question the ticket
- Shrink the work
A field guide for developers in the age of AI
Writing the code stopped being the hard part.
Deciding what to build, making it good, and making it safe for your whole team to ship did not. Fifty-four short moves you can start using in Monday's standup.
Move 07
Ask what breaks if we ship nothing
Not as a challenge. As an actual question, because the answer is the most useful thing anyone will tell you all week. You will get one of four answers, and each one tells you exactly what to do next.
Read this move →−27.5%
US employment for programmers, 2023 to 2025
−0.3%
US employment for software developers, same period
Bureau of Labor Statistics, via IEEE Spectrum. Same skills, different job titles, wildly different outcomes. The difference is judgment.
This is not a book about surviving AI
Only 44% of developers say AI threatens their job security. But 68% say it is making developers less skilled, and 66% say they now spend more time fixing code that is almost right than they used to spend writing it.
That is not a story about redundancy. It is a story about lost leverage. The typing got automated and the deciding did not, so the deciding is where all the value went. This book is about moving there deliberately, rather than waiting to be pushed.
What is inside
Three acts, fifty-four moves
Act II
Make
Real design craft, in rules you can apply in two minutes. Then get something clickable in front of a human within a day.
- Design it yourself
- Show it before you build it
- Know if it worked
Act III
Multiply
Your PM can write code now. Building the rails that make that safe is the part they cannot do. This is the moat.
- Build the rails
- Fence the model
- Be believed
What a move actually does
One question, asked once
Every chapter is a named move, a real before and after, and one thing to try this week. Here is Move 07 applied to an ordinary ticket.
Title: Add date range filter to reports dashboard
Priority: High
Description: Users need to be able to filter the
reports dashboard by a custom date range. Add a
date picker with start and end dates.Everything here is a solution. There is no problem in it anywhere.
Title: Sales can't compare quarter-over-quarter
Priority: High. Blocks Henderson renewal, 12 Sep
Problem: Sales pulls this into renewal calls to show
"this quarter vs last." Today they screenshot it
twice a week and paste both into a slide.
If we ship nothing: they keep screenshotting. Three
reps, about 20 min each per week.
Smallest thing that works: a "vs previous period"
toggle. Not a general date picker.
Open question: does anyone need arbitrary ranges?
Ask Dana.A smaller build, a real deadline, a named owner for the unknown.
Pricing
Free to read. Cheap to keep.
The book stays free on the web because that is how it reaches anyone. Pay only if you want it off the browser, or if you want the templates.
Read it
Free
The whole book, on the web, forever
- Every chapter, no signup
- No paywall, no sample chapters
- Linkable, quotable, sharable
The Download
€29
For reading away from a browser
- PDF and EPUB
- Lifetime updates
- Offline and e-reader friendly
Most useful
The Toolkit
€89
For actually running the plays
- Everything in The Download
- Templates: one-pager, discovery questions, spec-to-scenario
- Annotated teardowns of real product decisions
- A copy-paste guardrail starter kit
Teams
from €349
5, 10 or 25 seats
- One invoice, VAT registered
- Seat management
- Everyone speaking the same vocabulary
A chapter a week, while it is being written
The book is being written in the open. Get each new move as it lands, plus the working notes that do not make it into the final text.