About Tech Trenches
Years ago I watched a team with a million-dollar budget get outbuilt by three focused engineers. Same market, same tools, a fraction of the headcount. I have spent the years since trying to explain, precisely, why that happens. Tech Trenches is where I write it down.
What this is
Engineering-led systems forensics. I take a company, a product, a policy, a filing, a market, sometimes a war, and ask one question: how is this system broken, and who pays for it? Not whether the story is big or current, but whether there is a system underneath worth taking apart.
How I work
I am not neutral and I do not pretend to be. The standard here is disciplined subjectivity: state the position, separate data from interpretation, show the evidence chain, and say plainly where I might be wrong.
Artifacts outrank rhetoric. A contract, a budget line, a benchmark, or a production metric carries more weight than any executive quote, so that is what I build on.
Who is writing this
I have run engineering teams for over ten years, from five people to fifty-plus, currently as a Tech Lead at NineTwoThree. That work includes hundreds of one-on-ones, performance reviews, hiring trials, production incidents, and systems built under real operating pressure.
I write from Kyiv, which is its own kind of ground truth about which systems hold when the power goes out.
What I believe
Two convictions run under most of what I publish.
The scarce resource almost everywhere is competent people, and the systems that fail are the ones that stop reproducing competence.
And every crisis eventually lands on a physical or human floor: energy, infrastructure, attention, judgment. Money and rhetoric move that cost around. They do not abolish it.
This is not an anti-AI publication. I use these tools every day. What I argue against is unverified delegation, hidden cost, and replacement stories that production data does not support.
What to expect
No hot takes without a system underneath. No numbers compared across unlike categories. No tidy fix stapled on for comfort.
A precise diagnosis is a legitimate place to stop.
New essays land regularly. They name names, carry receipts, and leave you with either a rule you can use or a diagnosis precise enough to stand on its own.
Start here
Honk Is Not Magic. It’s 15 Years of Infrastructure With the Context Stripped Out.
Spotify’s AI story, reconstructed from the engineering artifacts beneath the keynote. A clean example of how Tech Trenches separates the visible demo from the system that made it possible.
Nobody Answers for the Lie They Sold
What happens when executives declare engineers obsolete, the labor market believes them, and nobody pays for being wrong. The most human expression of the publication’s accountability thesis.
The $50 Billion Utility
Why AI companies carry utility-like operating costs while receiving software-like valuations, and how growth moves the bill rather than eliminating it.
Europe Runs at Catastrophic Yield
From air conditioners and heat deaths to reactors, batteries, and Ukraine: how a system can preserve procedure while losing the capacity to build.
Subscribe if you want the machinery beneath technology made visible.
