You approved the AI tools. Now own what they ship.Velocity is up. Architecture conformance is unmeasured. Accountability is diffuse. The board question is coming — and right now you don't have an answer.
Change Intention: The Missing Primitive in Agentic EngineeringAgents generate code that compiles, passes lint, passes tests — and still quietly violates a boundary someone drew three sprints ago. The fix isn't a smarter agent. It's a missing primitive: Change Intention.Where Is Open Source Heading in the Agentic Era?When agents flood the pull-request queue, design intent becomes the new back pressure. How Ghostty, tldraw, Godot, curl, GitHub and the Linux kernel responded in 2026, and why rkito is free for open source, for life.
SERIES · 6 ESSAYSLeading in the agentic era, one role at a time.Read in order →
- 01CTO · You approved the AI tools. Now own what they ship.
- 02CSO · Your security policies exist. They are not enforced.
- 03VP Eng · Agentic code without a design gate is a liability your team will own.
- 04Architect · Your diagrams are inert. Your ADRs are unenforced.
- 05PO · Velocity is up. Predictability is down. Here's why.
- 06SRE · Your 3am alarm started with a silent drift.
Where Is Open Source Heading in the Agentic Era?When agents flood the pull-request queue, design intent becomes the new back pressure. How Ghostty, tldraw, Godot, curl, GitHub and the Linux kernel responded in 2026, and why rkito is free for open source, for life.Change Intention: The Missing Primitive in Agentic EngineeringAgents generate code that compiles, passes lint, passes tests — and still quietly violates a boundary someone drew three sprints ago. The fix isn't a smarter agent. It's a missing primitive: Change Intention.You approved the AI tools. Now own what they ship.Velocity is up. Architecture conformance is unmeasured. Accountability is diffuse. The board question is coming — and right now you don't have an answer.Your security policies exist. They are not enforced.SAST catches code vulnerabilities. Nobody catches design-level security violations before they ship. AWS Well-Architected, OWASP, ISO 27001 — enforced at the PR gate for the first time.Agentic code without a design gate is a liability your team will own.Your team is shipping faster. Nobody is accountable for the design decisions inside what ships. The post-mortem will trace back three sprints — and nobody will know who decided.Your diagrams are inert. Your ADRs are unenforced.The architecture practice is not broken — it is running on the wrong infrastructure for the era. Scale advisory, enforcement, and system state awareness without adding headcount.Velocity is up. Predictability is down. Here's why.Stories move to Done. Then they come back. Cycle time variance is high, estimates are wrong, and every retrospective calls it 'technical complexity.' It has a real name.Your 3am alarm started with a silent drift.The incident didn't start at 3am. It started three sprints ago, when an AI agent crossed a service boundary nobody reviewed. Technical debt is visible. Architectural drift is invisible — until 3am.