Multi-year practitioner research, drawn from a community of speakers and read through a single lens, Herbert Simon's bounded rationality, turned into practical instruments any team can use. A gift to the software community.
Some of it revisits our everyday practices (tests, design, collaboration) through a mental-health lens: daily stress, psychological safety, with bounded rationality as the through-line. The aim is plain: to help teams and people face their blockers and take care of their mental health, because before we work for a company, we work first with people.
🇬🇧 English first. 🇫🇷 Version française à venir. The whole suite is bilingual.
One download = all white papers + the ebook + the maturity scale & self-locator + the team-maturity-self-locator skill.
AI amplifies whatever already exists. The real question isn't "is AI good or bad for engineering?" It's how high can your team climb, together? Get the design right and AI augments; neglect it and AI overwhelms.
If you only try one thing: run the locator. It walks your team through nine axes, finds your floor, and names the single highest-leverage next move, without judging.
A warm, non-judgmental self-assessment you run in conversation. It locates your team on the Bounded-Rationality Maturity Scale, zooms into psychological safety when that's the floor, and suggests matching levers from the practitioner toolbox. A living tool, continuously improved.
State-of-the-art analysis of a practitioner community: 20 AI Agents Montréal talks and the CraftCode podcast, distilled into patterns, tensions, and one thesis.
The practices and patterns of agentic development, drawn from 20 talks: context engineering, tests-as-contract, spec-driven work, code health, the tensions teams actually hit.
Craft fundamentals from the CraftCode podcast (simple design, TDD and its variants, trunk-based development, flow metrics) and why they matter more, not less, with AI in the loop.
The cross-series thesis: craft is the prerequisite for AI to help rather than harm. Where the two series converge, and what it means for how teams adopt AI.
The synthesis, read through Herbert Simon's bounded rationality: AI as an amplifier, knowledge and intent debt, the isolation trap, and the new mental-health failure modes of the AI era, with the evidence behind the practitioner suite.
The same research, re-angled for the person and the team: daily stress, psychological safety, and a growth path from isolation to a team that thinks (and grows) together.
A field guide to a calmer day: psychological safety, the stress physiology behind overload, and why starting with a test settles the mind, in the age of AI.
Five levels (from fear to a resilient learning organization), each read through psychological safety, cognitive load, the shared mental model, and Simon's three bounds. A growth path, not a verdict.
The companion self-locator: a 9-axis radar your team rates honestly. Your level is the lowest axis; the tool names the one next move, and the psychological-safety deep-dive when that's the floor.
The self-locator made conversational: it runs the nine axes with you, computes the floor, and suggests matching levers. Featured above ↑
Curated and written by Nicolas Rosado, software engineer; host of the CraftCode podcast; organizer of AI Agents Montréal and Mental Health in Software Engineering Montréal; co-organizer of Software Crafters Montréal. He invited each speaker, drew the threads together, and developed the analytical lens. The selection, structure, theses, and conclusions are his own.
We are, each of us, a little of everyone we've crossed paths with, and Nicolas would stretch that to every talk he's watched, every book and every story he's read. The thread running through all of it is sharing: this suite is his way of passing those ideas on (the ball passed back to the community that gave them) in the very spirit the license below formalizes.
Released under Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). You're warmly encouraged to read it, share it, translate it, quote it, and build on it. Three simple conditions keep it in the spirit it was written in: credit the author (so the ideas, and the practitioners they came from, stay traceable), keep it non-commercial (it's a gift to the community, not a product to resell), and share alike (any adaptation stays just as open). Craft advances through practitioners who openly pass their knowledge to the next generation; this license simply formalizes that spirit. The license covers the author's own writing only; third-party quotations remain their owners' property.