Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Many people think that today, Gen AI is the revolution of the machines. That AI will make an engineer 3-5x more productive. Well, that’s not true and not even close to being true. Let’s pretend it’s true for one moment, then we can apply some scale economics to Generative AI, especially with AI coding agents like Claude Code or OpenAI Codex.   Let me be honest: I don’t think that using AI you can get 3-5x the productivity from engineers right now. There are so many things I need to debunk here; it’s even hard to choose one to start with. But for a moment, just. For the sake of argument, let’s believe it's true(just for a moment). That will help you to understand why AI has suddenly become so appealing to companies.

After 7+ months of hard work, my third book is out. Introducing:  Continuous Modernization : The never-ending discipline of improving microservices, monoliths, distributed monoliths, individuals, and teams at scale. Modernization is something I have done over and over in my life. Modernization is something that all companies need and will always need. The need for modernization will never go away, even with LLMs and AI. Technical debt, Anti-patterns, and bad decisions do not take days off. Complexity never shirks and continually grows. Companies do not stop getting bigger and doing more and more software critical to growth, delivering value to customers, and staying competitive and relevant in the market. We need a better way of doing software to drive the best outcomes out of us. Continuous modernization is the counterforce to technical debt and anti-patterns. Continuous modernization is how to continually improve, even when you think it's impossible and nothing can be done. We ca...

Have you ever thought about how to evaluate software? Outside of the context of Build vs Buy - Sounds like a crazy question, right? Well, the reality is that at scale, you must do more than just refactor everything for the sake of refactoring. Re-writes, Refactorings, and Re-Architect need to be opportunistic and deliver real value to the business. So if it's pretty hard to refactor everything, how to approach software at scale? Some rationalization of the state of affairs is important. Rationalization leads to proper prioritization paired with a good execution can be a powerful tool to deliver change and improve quality. First, the question might sound a bit overwhelming and difficult, but when you start diving deep, you realize what makes sense and what dont, and some shapes emerge. So before I go too deep into this matter, let's start with a simple question - why evaluate software? Why Evaluate software? Besides the context of Build vs Buy - There are plenty of reasons to ev...

There are many agile frameworks that try to handle the task of scaling agile to many teams or multiple products. This week I was reading this article on CIO about this matter. What a realize is that most of agile frameworks at scale are based on old principles like: process, communication and tools. How is that different from RUP? New practices but old principles all goes down to standard management principles.  What's missing? INHO 3 things: Culture, Leadership and Software Architecture. Scaling agile looks like a management problem is part is true but is more than that.