I started as an IC. Wrote code, shipped features, owned systems. Then I became a manager, and then a leader, and somewhere in that progression I absorbed a story that most engineers in leadership absorb: that you trade the craft for the scope. That building and leading are two different modes, and you pick one.
I didn’t love that story, but I believed it. You stop writing production code because you have to, not because you want to. The work becomes coordination and context and judgment rather than implementation. The craft goes dormant.
What I missed — and what took a long time to see clearly — is that management was always building. The systems of people, the culture, the strategy, the feedback loops: those are artifacts. They take the same instincts as software: clear mental models, iteration, awareness of failure modes, attention to interfaces. The materials are different. The mode is the same.
Agentic AI made this legible in a way I couldn’t have described before. When I started building with AI agents, I wasn’t just moving faster. I was collapsing the distinction that made me feel like I’d left something behind. Coding with AI is system design. System design is what leaders do. The craft didn’t have to be left behind — I just didn’t have tools that made staying close to it practical.
Shortrib Labs is the proof of that shift in practice. Every project here was built with agentic AI in a way that wasn’t possible before — not just faster, but differently. The lab is the experiment. The consulting follows from it.
Shortrib Labs is as much an experiment in what I can do as in what I can help you do — and that’s how I got here.