What an Automation Project Actually Costs
The quote is the smallest number in an automation project. The costs that decide whether it pays back are the ones nobody puts on the proposal: the explaining, ...
Insights & Articles
Thinking out loud on software, strategy, and what actually works.
Practical articles from the Albright Labs team on development, automation, and running a technology business.
The Signs You Have Outgrown Your Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are excellent software, and most organizations run on them longer than they should. The failure is quiet: throughput capped by headcount, reconcili...
How to Decide What to Automate First
Most organizations pick their first automation project badly. They automate the process that annoys them most, rather than the one that would pay back first. Th...
How to Build Software That Survives Five Years
Most software doesn't die from one bad decision. It dies from a long sequence of reasonable ones. Building software that survives five years is mostly about avo...
Why Plugin-Driven CMSs Get Expensive at Scale
Plugin-driven content systems look cheap. They're cheap until the project is small. As an organization grows, the total cost of plugins, integrations, maintenan...
How AI Changes Code Review in a Long-Lived Codebase
Code review in a long-lived codebase is partly archaeology. AI accelerates the surface-level checks, but the institutional history reviewers carry is exactly wh...
What AI Can and Can't Do in Software Estimation
Software estimation is part research, part judgment, and part politics. AI helps with the research, struggles with the judgment, and has no role in the politics...
Where AI Saves Real Hours on a Small Dev Team
On a small dev team, every hour shows up in the schedule. AI saves real time in a narrow set of activities, mostly the unglamorous ones, and wastes time when ap...
How to Tell If You Need a Refactor or a Rewrite
Refactor and rewrite are two completely different projects with two completely different cost profiles and two completely different failure modes. Most organiza...
How to Evaluate AI Coding Tools Without Falling for the Demo
Every AI coding tool demos well. The interesting question is which ones survive three months of real work. A useful evaluation looks past the showcase and tests...
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