Delivery

Painful Vibe coding with Codex

October 15, 2025

Use of LLMs I’ve been using LLMs for a while, primarily as a buddy that can help me with ideation or noticing gaps in my thinking. I rarely use the LLM output directly because it never feels complete or authentic. For written word, I find it can generate pretty generic wording with little impact or personality. Anything I do take directly, I’ll rework pretty heavily - and it’s just a judgement of whether doing the rework is more efficient than just starting from scratch.

A Policy for AI-enhanced software development

By Paul Blay in delivery, people

October 7, 2025

The DORA research group at Google recently came out with an AI capabilities model and capability number 1 is to have a “Clear and communicated AI stance”. Given my experience so far talking to other leaders and on the ground, here’s my proposal for what an effective AI stance could look like: Core Philosophy LLMs should amplify engineering cognition, not automate it This means… Human Ownership: Engineers must remain the authors and owners of production logic.

The agility Challenge for Embedded Software

By Paul Blay in embedded, delivery

December 2, 2020

If you’ve ever worked for a business that has it’s core focus in the embedded software space, I suspect you are more likely to have had to tolerate software development practices from 20 years ago. If you’ve read many books on Agile software development, DevOps or other modern practices, you may also have noticed that they almost all talk about software that targets a server or website, possibly a PC. But unless you’re reading a very different library to me, you’ll not have seen much talk about embedded software.

7 Practical Steps To Increase Accountability In Agile Teams

By Paul Blay in delivery, people

August 17, 2020

Individual and team accountability is critical for any high functioning team, I believe that this is often a concern for senior management, especially when considering an agile transformation, and can be difficult to attain. At the points in my career that I have seen senior management push back on the adoption of agile methodologies, the main areas of contention has been around the feeling of losing “control” over the delivery roadmap.

Why the bottleneck is everything

By Paul Blay in delivery

September 12, 2018

This is probably the least intuitive idea that I’ve come across in my working career, but when explained and demonstrated, possibly one of the most important. Here it is: it is inefficient to have everyone working at 100% effort, 100% of the time. This seems wrong – we’re paying for these people, they should be putting all their time and effort towards our product features! Get back to working on them!

Motivation 2.0

By Paul Blay in people, delivery

July 9, 2018

How are you engaging your team? Are you running a regular appraisal cycle where everyone’s individual score is totted up and ultimately dictates financial reward (pay increase, bonus, share options) or, on the other side of the scale, performance improvement plans? How are you finding this? Do people who get the financial rewards become more engaged and effective throughout the year? Do those on the performance improvement plans “pull their socks up” and become superstars now that they know they’re not performing to expectations?

what is agility?

By Paul Blay in delivery

February 3, 2017

Strictly speaking, ‘agile’ is an adjective, a descriptive word… like “nimble” & so the more obvious title “What is agile?” probably would have made a small, hardcore, fraction of people up-chuck a little in their mouths. (I am not so offended on this one, but tell me something is “addicting” and I will develop an unruly lower eyelid twitch). I think the reason behind this is due to how commercialised and corporate the term has become over the years – ironically, as the original manifesto moved thinking in a completely different direction.