@vburckhardt

A decade of shaping teams, and the book that made sense of it

Mar 9 · 8 min read · I recently read Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. It's one of those books where you keep nodding as you read, recognising patterns you've lived through. Over the past decade, I've bu

Agent skills look like markdown. Treat them like software.

Feb 14 · 7 min read · I have spent the last couple of weeks exploring agent skills, in the context of making it easier for our customers to build complex infrastructure-as-code solutions on top of our curated Terraform modules. The domain is not directly relevant here, bu...

Software engineering culture: mindset, teams, and action

Dec 22, 2025 · 10 min read · Originally published in December 2025 This year, more than most, made me think about team structure, and through that lens, about engineers and people. The patterns I've observed over the years keep sharpening as I see them repeat: anticipation and e...

Breaking the doom-prompting loop with spec-driven development

Nov 18, 2025 · 8 min read · Every developer using AI coding tools has experienced the loop. You prompt, the AI generates code, something isn't quite right, you prompt again, the AI breaks something else while fixing the first issue, you prompt again. An hour later you're deeper...

The shift toward agentic development

Nov 3, 2025 · 11 min read · Over the past two years, software development has changed in ways that feel significant. These are patterns I'm noticing both in my own work and across the industry. I've been using AI coding tools in personal projects for over two years. The evoluti...