Philosophy on Ole M.R. Rabanal

Most software fails before anyone writes a line of code

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

By the time a project is visibly in trouble, the decision that doomed it is usually months old. The code is rarely the problem. The problem is that the system was asked to do something nobody had stated precisely, for a business process nobody had mapped, under constraints nobody had written down.

This is why I keep ending up in the same kind of room: aging systems nobody fully understands, rewrites that stalled halfway, organisations caught between what the business wants and what engineering can deliver. These look like engineering failures from the inside. They almost never are.

Getting the thinking right up front is what makes AI build the right thing

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The arrival of capable code generation did not change what makes software succeed. It changed the cost of the failure mode. Vague intent has always produced software that merely looks right; what is new is how quickly, and how plausibly, it can now be produced.

A model given a loose description will return something confident and complete. It will not stop to ask which of the four possible readings you meant, because nothing in the request signals that there were four. The output compiles, it demos, and it encodes an interpretation nobody chose.

Design so every developer delivers a little better

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most advice about building software assumes a team you do not have. Hire exceptional people; give them autonomy; get out of the way. It is good advice and it is rarely actionable. Real teams are assembled from who was available, at the rate the budget allowed, in the town the office is in.

The structure those people work inside, though, is something you can change. And it determines a surprising amount of what they are able to produce.