Jeffrey Fredrick

Father, husband, developer, executive coach, active dreamer Co-author of the book Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture

[Ryan Singer @rjs]

When it comes to DDD, just do Ubiquitous Language. 90% of it is that. Don’t get distracted by aggregate blah blah and miss the point. Common language is everything.

[Douglas Squirrel @douglassquirrel]

If you aren't testing your software in production, you aren't living in the real world. 🚀 @jtf and I talk about why "shifting right" is the future of testing—and how titans like Etsy use it to find the ground truth. Intrigued? Listen here: https://t.co/ME1AUnRugQ

[World Bollard Association™ @WorldBollard]

Only bollards can deliver this much happiness.
#WorldBollardAssociation

[Jamie Mill @jamiemill]

Pushed a big update to the Layers design skills (https://t.co/SFsyp9678B). After using them on real projects, the problem was obvious: the AI marched through every phase and produced a pile of documents no one was ever going to read.

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

If the *only* impact of LLMs professionally was causing people to "think out loud" in a way which was routinely captured by computer systems and then could be operated on by computer systems, that would *by itself* be one of the most consequential changes in practice in 100 years

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis has an awesome opening riff about how most people know the difference between right and wrong, but they justify acting immorally by appealing to "special exception." They know they shouldn't hit a friend, but what if that friend was being so mean? They know they shouldn't steal a seat a bus, but what if that person got up and created a moment's confusion and then the seat was up for grabs? Etc.

When I read this section, I thought a lot about contemporary politics and the way that people justify their politics, not by appealing to higher principles, but rather by appealing to "special exception" to argue that their admitted indecency is justifiable in context.

A lot of MAGA vice is justified by special exception. Trump's defenders rarely defend his crookedness directly. They don't say "it's wonderful to use trade policy to enrich the Oval Office, it's really awesome." They say: Well, look, it doesn't really matter, because the left is so dangerous, Biden maybe did something similar 3 years ago, Democrats would do the same in power, and so forth.

I heard something similar in that NYT conversation everybody's talking about. You even see it in the headline: ‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ Why, hello, special exception. When you start arguing that stealing food and French paintings is justifiable in the context of political protest in an age of prevailing distrust, you're similarly not arguing *for* any kind of a universal principle. Nobody actually wants 300 million people stealing fruit from the grocery store. Nobody actually wants every Louvre visitor trying to rip a Manet off the walls. These virtues don't scale. (Because they're not virtuous!)

Sap that I am, I want us to get to a place where politics is about fighting for what is right and decent, not about justifying what sort of indecent behavior might be somewhat understandable or technically justifiable given the other side's vice or the prevailing levels of indecency. The point is to build the kind of goodness that scales.

https://t.co/iPF65NuyeU

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[Douglas Squirrel @douglassquirrel]

Stop the "Slack-hello" dance! 🛑 @jtf and I discuss Crocker’s Rules: a discipline where you take responsibility for your own mind and demand raw information over "noisy politeness."
Maximize your team's speed here: https://t.co/sp2fpQ3Zw8

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

Journalists: if you ever have a thing you understand to be true, but cannot cite it or get it past editors due to commitments made to sources, describe your belief about the world to an LLM and ask the LLM if it can find public evidence which unambiguously confirms the belief.

[Douglas Squirrel @douglassquirrel]

Why is @jtf - Founder of CITCON:AI - so frustrated with AI?! We explore his frustrations around how organisations are approaching AI rollouts without learning any lessons from change-management initiatives that have gone before - like early Agile.
https://t.co/TLLphTNZOZ

[Brangus🔍⏹️ @RatOrthodox]

So come to Summer Camp! Bring some kind of irl content for others to interact with, whether you add it to the schedule as a formal session or not. You can get tickets, rooms, and more information at https://t.co/mKMIgZEuap

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

Paraphrase from Money Stuff podcast, after an excellent and wonky discussion of various trades he’s putting together in private credit:

Q: Did you enjoy this discussion?
Boaz Weinstein: Are you kidding? I talk about this stuff when I’m home alone, to an empty room.

[Douglas Squirrel @douglassquirrel]

This week on Troubleshooting Agile with @jtf and I discover how the simple yet powerful technique of walking the board can reshape executive accountability, improve focus on strategic initiatives, and foster team cohesion.
https://t.co/EPAVCEKAQ6

[Neet @neet_sol]

I hope this email doesn't find you

I hope you've escaped

That you're free

[@norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com on Bluesky @norootcause]

Coding was the bottleneck, then code reviews were the bottleneck. At some point, incidents are going to be the bottleneck.

[Nick Davidov @Nick_Davidov]

16 year old: Dad, I just drove my friend’s manual car!
Me: wait, I didn’t teach you how to drive a manual, how?
16: well I figured it out!
Me *suspicious*: how many pedals did it have?
16: 2 of course!
Turns out a “manual” is a car without FSD

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

250 years ago today Adam Smith gave the world a fantastic insight.

That order, cooperation and prosperity are not ordered from above by priests or chiefs but emerge from the social interactions of ordinary people.

It’s the most revolutionary and benign idea ever proposed.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.

Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes.

As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.

It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

[Troubleshooting Agile @TShootingAgile]

It’s okay to be confused about Vibe Coding! On this week's episode of Troubleshooting Agile, @jtf and @douglassquirrel respond to a listener’s argument from our series with @RealGeneKim on Vibe Coding.

Link in the reply.

[The Other Alistair @TotherAlistair]

I could probably republish this page every month and it would do some people good.