Productivity
fromMountaingoatsoftware
5 hours agoWhy Smart Teams Overcommit And How Leaders Make It Worse
Leaders should avoid pressuring teams into overcommitting, as teams often do this themselves due to their inherent optimism.
Lydia noticed the machine's battery was running low and told two other team members. The more senior went to fetch the backup battery, while the junior team member suggested a quicker method that Lydia firmly rejected.
AI made producing software cheap, but understanding it is still expensive. The Manifesto optimizes for the former. This addendum shifts the emphasis toward the latter. Four updated values, three refined principles, with reasoning for each.
"I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue."
One of the challenges teams face when working with large boards or displaying multiple fields on work item cards is limited screen space. This became even more noticeable with the rollout of the New Boards hub, which introduced additional spacing and padding for improved readability. While this enhances clarity, it can also reduce the number of cards visible at once.
The real cost of poor observability isn't just downtime; it's lost trust, wasted engineering hours, and the strain of constant firefighting. But most teams are still working across fragmented monitoring tools, juggling endless alerts, dashboards, and escalation systems that barely talk to one another, which acts like chaos disguised as control. The result is alert storms without context, slow incident response times, and engineers burned out from reacting instead of improving.
During my eight years working in agile product development, I have watched sprints move quickly while real understanding of user problems lagged. Backlogs fill with paraphrased feedback. Interview notes sit in shared folders collecting dust. Teams make decisions based on partial memories of what users actually said. Even when the code is clean, those habits slow delivery and make it harder to build software that genuinely helps people.
Your coding apprentice can build, at your direction, pretty much anything now. The task becomes more like conducting an orchestra than playing in it. Not all members of the orchestra want to conduct, but given that is where things are headed, I think we all need to consider it at least.
Giving coding agents full access to all of Ramp's engineering tools is what makes Inspect truly innovative. Instead of only letting agents write basic code, Ramp's system runs in sandboxed virtual machines on Modal. It works seamlessly with databases, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools like Sentry and Datadog, feature flags, and communication platforms such as Slack and GitHub. Agents can write code and ensure it works by using the same testing and validation processes that engineers use every day.
To find the typical example, just observe an average stand-up meeting. The ones who talk more get all the attention. In her article, software engineer Priyanka Jain tells the story of two colleagues assigned the same task. One posted updates, asked questions, and collaborated loudly. The other stayed silent and shipped clean code. Both delivered. Yet only one was praised as a "great team player."
Manual database deployment means longer release times. Database specialists have to spend several working days prior to release writing and testing scripts which in itself leads to prolonged deployment cycles and less time for testing. As a result, applications are not released on time and customers are not receiving the latest updates and bug fixes. Manual work inevitably results in errors, which cause problems and bottlenecks.