Writing on engineering leadership, AI-assisted development, system design, and building teams.https://barnett-studios.com/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/bridging-strategy-and-execution-in-the-age-of-ai-agents/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/bridging-strategy-and-execution-in-the-age-of-ai-agents/AI changed what's fast. Nobody changed what's slow. Teams are merging twice as many pull requests while review times double and bug rates climb. The bottleneck moved — and most organisations are only now starting to notice.Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/every-dependency-is-a-decision-you-didnt-make/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/every-dependency-is-a-decision-you-didnt-make/Your lockfile is hundreds of trust relationships nobody negotiated. The highest-profile supply chain attacks of the last decade exploited trust, not code — and no scanner caught any of them in time.Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/scaling-from-five-to-forty-engineers/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/scaling-from-five-to-forty-engineers/The magic of a small team isn't culture — it's proximity. When you scale, you can't preserve it. You have to replace it with something deliberately designed. Most teams import a playbook from a company ten times their size instead.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/strangler-fig-in-practice/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/strangler-fig-in-practice/Everyone knows the strangler fig pattern. Few teams finish the migration. Here's what actually kills it — and the fixes that work.Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/operating-a-live-trading-system/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/operating-a-live-trading-system/Operational failures kill more personal trading systems than bad strategies. What actually goes wrong at 3 a.m. — and the defences that earn their place.Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/capital-safety-is-an-architecture-decision/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/capital-safety-is-an-architecture-decision/How Meridian — a personal crypto trading system — treats capital safety as a first-class architecture constraint, with defence in depth, state machines, and automatic emergency procedures.Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/eight-editors-zero-writers/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/eight-editors-zero-writers/I've finished books but never sent the fiction to agents — never felt it was ready. Twenty years later, I'm building the tool I wish I'd had: not an AI that writes for you, but one that reads like a professional editor.Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/context-engineering-the-skill-that-replaced-prompt-engineering/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/context-engineering-the-skill-that-replaced-prompt-engineering/Everyone's talking about context engineering as if it's a prompting technique. It's not. It's the skill that determines whether your AI investment produces strategy or noise — and the part that matters most has nothing to do with code.Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/the-first-90-days-as-a-fractional-cto/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/the-first-90-days-as-a-fractional-cto/The 90-day plan looks clean on paper. Discovery, diagnosis, roadmap. In practice, you're three weeks in and the client is asking you to ship a feature. Here's what actually happens — and the line you need to hold.Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/micro-frontends-when-to-split-and-when-to-stay/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/micro-frontends-when-to-split-and-when-to-stay/Micro-frontends solve a real problem — but only if you actually have that problem. A practical guide to when the split is worth it, what the architecture really costs, and the pain points nobody warns you about.Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/the-invisible-architecture/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/the-invisible-architecture/Incentives, information flow, and the norms that survive scaling — the invisible architecture underneath every engineering system you build.Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/diff-code-review-context-your-llm-actually-needs/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/diff-code-review-context-your-llm-actually-needs/Pasting a raw git diff into your LLM is asking for a review with half the files missing. cxpak diff adds callers, callees, and type signatures — within a token budget.Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/post-quantum-cryptography-practical-primer/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/post-quantum-cryptography-practical-primer/The standards are final, the migration clocks are ticking, and your TLS traffic is probably already using post-quantum key exchange. Here's what the algorithms actually do, what's deployed, and what you should do about it.Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/human-in-the-loop/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/human-in-the-loop/The best AI systems aren't autonomous. They're collaborative. Full automation is a seductive goal that breaks on contact with reality — the winning pattern is bounded autonomy.Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/trace-finding-code-that-matters/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/trace-finding-code-that-matters/Most LLM context is wasted on code that doesn't matter. cxpak's trace command walks your dependency graph and packs only the relevant paths — so your model debugs with a map, not a haystack.Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/first-steps-as-a-team-lead/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/first-steps-as-a-team-lead/Every leadership book gives you the same ten rules. Most of them are right. All of them are incomplete. What I'd tell myself before stepping into the role.Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/resilient-by-design/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/resilient-by-design/Most engineers optimise for uptime. In regulated finance, that instinct will cost you. What I learned about failing hard, recovering deliberately, and building compliance into the architecture.Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/spending-cpu-cycles-so-you-dont-spend-tokens/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/spending-cpu-cycles-so-you-dont-spend-tokens/Why I built a Rust CLI that packages codebases into token-budgeted briefings for LLMs — and what I learned about the real cost of context.Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/the-appropriate-level-of-complexity/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/the-appropriate-level-of-complexity/Over-engineering is a well-known sin. Under-engineering is the same sin wearing a different hat. The goal was never simplicity — it was the right complexity, designed to evolve.Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://barnett-studios.com/blog/setting-up-multi-agent-workflows/https://barnett-studios.com/blog/setting-up-multi-agent-workflows/What I learned building a trading platform backoffice with six AI agents — before the playbook existed.Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT