Lee Robinson

For anyone curious about the third thing I wanted to try implementing in Sguaba, I ended up writing it myself, and then having Claude suggest the tests. Worked quite well! Given the nuances involved in designing this mechanism (and I discovered more nuance as I went), I suspect it would have struggled quite a lot with implementing it from scratch 😅 https://lnkd.in/dSRm6Kxm

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Over the past year, my team has been rethinking how platform engineering works at scale—and AI agents are at the center of that transformation. Traditionally, driving consistency across thousands of Microsoft codebases meant issuing tens of thousands of tickets and hoping developers could interpret and implement them correctly. It was slow, inconsistent, and pulled engineers away from feature work. Now, instead of fan-out work, we're focusing on centralizing that work and feeding it to our coding agent so developers can focus on the creative parts of their job. This shift isn’t just about automation—it’s about redefining developer experience. AI agents are helping us build software that’s secure, consistent, and maintainable, while preserving the velocity that will keep Microsoft competitive. Thanks to @darrylktaft and @the-new-stack for the thoughtful conversation. Read more here: https://aka.ms/AAxr3um #AI #PlatformEngineering #DeveloperExperience 

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Here's the leadership strategy that propelled me to Principal Engineer at Google: "I push rocks down hills." This is the pithiest summary of Principal Engineer-ing that I've come up with, and it's a major part of how I approach exec-level engineering leadership. Moving up the career ladder as an engineer is about finding leverage: ways to produce more value per unit of time. You can grow your skills so you can handle harder projects and finish them faster. You can improve your judgment so you identify opportunities that produce more value for the effort. You can lead teams, so your skills and judgment get magnified across more contributors. One way to magnify your output as a leader is by turning a hard problem into an easy problem. Something I've observed over time is that it's a lot more challenging to start a project than to keep a project moving in the same direction. The first few commits, the project outline, the high-level architecture: these are the hardest and the most consequential challenges. Once the skeleton is in place, it's harder for a project to run off the rails. Starting projects is hard; maintaining that momentum is comparatively easy. This leads to the discipline of pushing rocks down hills. Your goal isn't to drive a project to completion; it's to impart enough momentum to the project that it will cross the finish line even if you stop paying attention to it. The goal is to build teams that don't need you. Don't build teams with yourself at the center: build teams with yourself on the outside. Once a problem is moving under its own momentum, it's no longer a high-leverage place to spend your time. You can move on. It's time to push a different rock down the hill. One consequence is that you will start more projects than you finish. Not because the projects *don't* finish, but because *you're* not the one driving them over the line. You need to have the humility to step back and give credit to the folks who finish the job. Scaling yourself means taking a smaller share of credit for a larger number of projects.

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