Shane O’Connor runs Off Spec, a series about what the specs don’t capture. This edition is a written Q&A on platform engineering at scale, why developer experience is a CEO decision, and where AI agent governance is genuinely new versus an old problem at a new volume.
Two lines from it:
Being technically better does not move adoption. Engineers will choose the familiar slightly worse tool over the unfamiliar better one almost every time, and they are not wrong to, because switching costs them something today and pays them back next quarter.
If your product needs an internal champion to threaten people into using it, you have sold us a political problem, not a platform.
The full piece also covers the metric that actually moves a CFO, what a platform has to give an agent that it never had to give a human developer, and the one failure mode that still keeps me up.