I’m shelving Collabchek.

It’s the right call but it still stings. Collabchek was a bet on a future where teams of human engineers needed better tools to stay coordinated as codebases and organizations grew. It’s amazing how poorly that assumption has aged.

Why I’m stopping

Collabchek assumed a world where software was still written primarily by humans coordinating with each other. Agentic AI has taken a big bite out of that assumption. When an agent can open a PR, run the tests, respond to review comments, and iterate overnight, a lot of the coordination problems I was trying to solve either evaporate or morph into new problems which I’m still developing an intuition for.

I could do the hero entrepreneur thing and keep pushing. Founders are supposed to be stubborn. But there’s being stubborn because you believe in yourself and your ideas and there’s being willfully ignorant of market shifts. The fundamental nature of software development is changing and no amount of stubborn grinding is going to help. Collabchek would need to become a completely different product.

So, I’m shelving it. It’s not dead but it’s also not something I’m going to keep pouring time into for now.

Meanwhile

Building a product to improve development team execution and collaboration has forced me to think deeply about AI, how to use it, and its impacts on work. I’m much more informed, technically and socially, about AI than I was a year ago. I’ve written about AI’s impact on work, shared lessons I’ve learned using AI to help me build Collabchek, explored building weird things with Claude as a creative exercise, and open sourced nib, the tool I built to use AI to help me write better fiction.

The next few years of software engineering and technical leadership are going to be weird. There’s just no getting around it. The old playbooks for hiring, building software, and structuring teams have to change. Judging from my social feeds they already are. Figuring out the new playbooks is interesting work, and I want to do it alongside thoughtful people who are taking it seriously.

What I’m looking for

I’m looking for my next engineering leadership role.

The work I’m most drawn to is with teams building seriously with AI and comfortable working in genuinely unsettled territory. I’ve led engineering teams through good times and tough times. New product launches, infrastructure rebuilds, product pivots, cloud cost optimizations, and more than a few hairy incidents. I’d like to put that experience to work on problems that actually matter now.

If that sounds like something you’re working on (or you know someone who is), I’d love to talk. You can reach me through email or LinkedIn. Both are linked in this blog’s header.