Less but better

There's real power in subtraction. It's a theme that I've applied throughout my career. As a developer, I often (half) joked that my favorite key on the keyboard was "delete". Removing complexity is liberating.

The first time I read Greg McKeown's Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, I found the concept of "less but better" compelling, but at the time very unrealistic in practice. It was more like an inspirational jolt, but the pressures of the job creep back in, and soon, the pursuit of less falls to the side.

I recently re-read Essentialism, and this time around, it felt like it was within reach, and it was because of what I've been experiencing as I apply AI to the way that I work. Not theoretical, but actual impact in my day to day.

Less toil, less context switching, less technical debt, less rework. Less friction. For years I've been chasing smooth, removing the drag that slows engineering teams down. But this new pursuit of less is something more powerful. A pull request that used to take a day now takes an hour. The friction doesn't just shrink; it compounds in reverse.

What's changed is that AI isn't simply accelerating anymore. It's compounding. There's a feedback loop between the models, the tooling, and the practitioners that's pushing the pace in ways we haven't seen with previous advances. And the teams building on a frictionless foundation are the ones pulling ahead.

I wrote Frictionless Enterprise in 2023, just as this wave was building. Its core ideas, shredding tech debt and creating perpetual momentum, are even more relevant now that agentic development is here. When I started writing a sequel, I realized that by the time I finished, the landscape would have already shifted beneath it.

So instead of a book that arrives late, this is a blog that arrives on time. I'm writing about the pursuit of less (friction) in real time: ideas, patterns, experiences, and hard-won lessons as they emerge.

If this eventually becomes a book that's fine, but the ideas shouldn't have to wait.