Engineering writing about decisions that are genuinely contested.
Written by the people doing the work. Where there is a real trade-off we set out both sides; where there is a right answer we say so.
Which business processes should you automate first?
A ranking method that survives contact with reality, and the three characteristics that make a process a bad first candidate.
Read Software Engineering · 7 min readMonolith vs microservices: what actually makes sense?
Service boundaries are an organisational decision with a technical bill attached. Most teams pay the bill before they need the benefit.
Read AI Chatbots · 8 min readHow to build an AI chatbot that understands your business
The model is not the hard part. Getting your own knowledge into a state it can be retrieved from is.
Read AWS Cost Optimization · 8 min readAWS cost optimization: where cloud bills go wrong
The recurring causes, roughly in the order we find them, and why the biggest number on the invoice is usually not the biggest opportunity.
Read AI · 7 min readAI chatbots vs AI agents: what businesses actually need
The two are engineered differently, fail differently and cost differently. Choosing the wrong one is the most common way an AI project stalls.
Read Software Engineering · 7 min readWhen should a business build custom software instead of buying SaaS?
A decision framework that accounts for the costs on both sides — including the ones that do not appear on either invoice.
Read AI · 6 min readRAG vs fine-tuning: which approach makes sense?
They solve different problems. Most business cases need retrieval; a minority genuinely benefit from fine-tuning, and a few need both.
Read Technology Strategy · 6 min readWhere AI creates real business value — and where it does not
A short taxonomy of the work AI is genuinely good at, the work it is bad at, and the tell that separates them.
ReadOur editorial rules
- Nothing published that we would not say to a client who disagreed
- No invented statistics, no borrowed case studies, no percentages we cannot evidence
- Trade-offs presented as trade-offs, including where the answer is not to build the thing
- Written for someone who will act on it, not for a search engine
- Updated when we change our minds, with the date shown
If a piece here is wrong, tell us. We would rather correct it than leave it ranking.
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