# Brian Wald

> Engineering leader writing about AI, platform engineering, DevOps, and the shape of software teams.

## Blog

- [The Next Golden Path Is for Agents](https://brianwald.com/blog/platforms-newest-user-isnt-human.md): Platforms have always served two kinds of users. The organization standardizes most teams onto a managed path and trusts a few to work directly with the primitives. Agents are a third user that fits neither path, and the next golden path has to be designed for them.
- [AI Needs the Context Auth Was Built to Limit](https://brianwald.com/blog/auth-was-built-to-limit-context.md): Access controls were built for two cases: automated workloads with a predictable footprint, or a human stitching tools together by hand. AI agents are neither, and the Vercel incident previews what breaks when we stretch the old model to cover them.
- [AI Is Forcing the Platform Rebuild That Should Have Happened Years Ago](https://brianwald.com/blog/ai-forcing-the-platform-rebuild.md): AI adoption at scale keeps failing for the same reason platform engineering never got funded. Now they are the same investment.
- [Ungoverned Context Is a Real Supply Chain Risk for Agentic Workflows](https://brianwald.com/blog/ungoverned-context-supply-chain-risk.md): Ungoverned context is a real supply chain risk for agentic workflows. Most teams can identify the agent's runtime but have no way to reconstruct what sources actually shaped the output.
- [Notes from the Field](https://brianwald.com/blog/why-i-write.md): Making sense of the signal in software, especially now that AI is changing what the signal even looks like.

## Musings

- [AI writing is bad, so I built around it](https://brianwald.com/musings/ai-writing-process.md): I hate the way AI writes, but it can provide a ton of benefit in the writing process.

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