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Engineering Constants: What never changes about building software
AI will transform how software teams work. This book is about what won't change.
Agile was going to change everything. So were microservices, and cloud. Each one left the same seven problems standing. AI is the fourth shift, and the most convincing it writes the code, shrinks the team, and collapses the cost of execution. What it does not move are the
The system mirrors the communication structure. Conway's Law has held since 1968, validated across 142 studies. It does not care whether the builders are humans or AI agents. Coordination cost is the real scaling limit. Ten times the capability per engineer produces about three and a half times the output. Amdahl's Law does the arithmetic. Context is the bottleneck, not capability. Writing code was never the hard part. Knowing why this code, here, now — that knowledge is tacit, and it does not transfer by retrieval. You can't measure what actually matters. Goodhart's Law has defeated every productivity metric for sixty years. It is defeating the AI metrics now. Interfaces are where everything breaks. Every AI agent is a new boundary, with new implicit contracts nobody negotiated. Accountability doesn't distribute, it just hides. The courts, the regulators — and the 3am page — all require a named human. Decisions still have costs. Making something cheaper to execute does not make it cheaper to get wrong. Ariane 5 proved it for $370 million. From Klarna's eighteen-month reversal to Duolingo's walk-back, from Boeing's 737 MAX to the randomised trial that found AI made experienced open-source developers 19% slower while they felt 20% faster, Engineering Constants names the properties that survive every revolution — with the studies, the case histories, and the numbers that show why they hold.
For CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and the staff engineers being asked why the team isn't shipping ten times this is the structural physics beneath the paradigm. The tools will keep changing. These won't.
The companion Engineering The Hidden Costs of Technical Decisions counts the costs. Engineering Constants names the laws. Read together, they are a single account of the hidden structure behind engineering decisions.
AI changes how software gets built. It does not change what makes building software hard. Everything else is weather.
Agile was going to change everything. So were microservices, and cloud. Each one left the same seven problems standing. AI is the fourth shift, and the most convincing it writes the code, shrinks the team, and collapses the cost of execution. What it does not move are the
The system mirrors the communication structure. Conway's Law has held since 1968, validated across 142 studies. It does not care whether the builders are humans or AI agents. Coordination cost is the real scaling limit. Ten times the capability per engineer produces about three and a half times the output. Amdahl's Law does the arithmetic. Context is the bottleneck, not capability. Writing code was never the hard part. Knowing why this code, here, now — that knowledge is tacit, and it does not transfer by retrieval. You can't measure what actually matters. Goodhart's Law has defeated every productivity metric for sixty years. It is defeating the AI metrics now. Interfaces are where everything breaks. Every AI agent is a new boundary, with new implicit contracts nobody negotiated. Accountability doesn't distribute, it just hides. The courts, the regulators — and the 3am page — all require a named human. Decisions still have costs. Making something cheaper to execute does not make it cheaper to get wrong. Ariane 5 proved it for $370 million. From Klarna's eighteen-month reversal to Duolingo's walk-back, from Boeing's 737 MAX to the randomised trial that found AI made experienced open-source developers 19% slower while they felt 20% faster, Engineering Constants names the properties that survive every revolution — with the studies, the case histories, and the numbers that show why they hold.
For CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and the staff engineers being asked why the team isn't shipping ten times this is the structural physics beneath the paradigm. The tools will keep changing. These won't.
The companion Engineering The Hidden Costs of Technical Decisions counts the costs. Engineering Constants names the laws. Read together, they are a single account of the hidden structure behind engineering decisions.
AI changes how software gets built. It does not change what makes building software hard. Everything else is weather.
235 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 14, 2026
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