the nilenso blog. ensonians write about work and life

Minimum Viable Benchmark
A case for building your own minimum viable benchmark.
How to work with Product: Taste and Adjust
Building great products requires immediate connection to what you're creating. Learn how to establish feedback loops that enable teams to taste and adjust at every phase of product development.
How to work with Product: To What Port Do You Sail?
Without clear goals, teams tread water. How engineering can work with product to demand clarity, establish observability, and build feedback loops that tie back to meaningful metrics.
How to work with Product: At the Tea Table
The most impactful engineering work happens when there's a great relationship with product. How to listen empathically, get involved early, and create the synergy that powers wonderful products.
A Short Lesson in Simpler Prompts
How I went from 300-word prompts that barely worked to 15-word prompts that worked quite well.
Fight context rot with context observability
I built a tool that pulls apart LLM context into meaningful components that you can see, measure, and then meaningfully engineer.
Artisanal shims for the bitter lesson age
Have you priced in the bitter lesson in your AI application's architecture?
What are popular AI coding benchmarks actually measuring?
Popular benchmarks are narrower than you'd want.
The common sense unit of work
Consider refactoring the unit of work that your team operates on.
The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
The craft of AI-assisted software creation is substantially about correctly managing units of work.
My Quarterly System Health Check-in
An operational exercise for engineering leaders.