Engineer · leader · writer
John Munn
I write about the decisions engineering leaders have to make before the answer is obvious.
For more than twenty years, I've inherited systems, grown teams, missed estimates, retired code, and watched reasonable local decisions become expensive organizational ones. This site is where I work through what those experiences taught me.
Problems I Keep Returning To
Deciding what to stop building when every request has a plausible business case.
Untangling architecture problems that are really ownership problems.
Helping senior engineers explain consequential decisions without hiding behind jargon.
Writing
- Technical
Code Was Always a Liability. AI Is Letting It Grow Faster Than Ever.
The biggest risk of AI may not be bad code. It may be creating software faster than organizations can understand it. A look at code ownership, complexity, and the future of software stewardship.
· 7 min read - Technical
Documents as Code
AI coding tools are exposing the messy reality behind Jira tickets, stale docs, Slack decisions, and drifting product specs.
· 7 min read - Technical
Keep Simple Things Simple. Let Complex Things Earn Their Complexity.
Most systems get complicated too early. This explores why teams overbuild, how complexity creeps in, and when it’s actually worth it.
· 8 min read
Things I built
Projects
Featured Project
Clawsake: An AI Gift Memory and Recommendation System
Clawsake is an AI-powered gift memory system that captures gift ideas, preferences, and important dates, then uses local retrieval, SQLite persistence, semantic search, and OpenClaw reasoning to answer the question: what should I buy right now?
Have a problem worth comparing notes on?
Tell me what decision is stuck, who owns it, and what happens if nothing changes. That is enough to start.