A reading path for PMs, engineers, and operators dealing with messy workflows, hidden exceptions, and AI-built software. Start with the big picture, then move into extraction method, outputs, diagnostics, and failure modes.
See where exceptions, overrides, and undefined terms usually slip through before build.
Understand how strong PMs, analysts, and consultants turn messy explanations into reviewable logic.
Read essays that include rules, gaps, source trace, and the structures engineering actually needs.
Part 01 of 08
Why vague logic ships
Start here
AI can turn half-specified workflow logic into plausible software fast. That makes hidden rules, exceptions, and approval paths more expensive than before.
Why read this
Reading path
Read in order or jump to the piece you need. The sequence moves from the big picture to extraction method, reviewable outputs, hidden logic diagnostics, and downstream automation risk.
Part 02 of 08
Extraction beats transcription
AI made coding cheap. It did not make judgment legible. The new bottleneck is turning tacit workflow logic into something teams can actually review before build.
Inside this essay
Part 03 of 08
How to pull out the real rules
Good extraction is not generic meeting hygiene. It is knowing how to turn vague expert language into thresholds, branches, gaps, and reviewable logic before the call ends.
Inside this essay
Part 04 of 08
Meetings must become logic
A good SME call should leave behind a reviewable package of rules, flow, pseudo-code, scenarios, gaps, and source trace engineers and coding agents can build from.
Inside this essay
Part 05 of 08
Ask Dan is a system smell
Coding got democratized faster than expert business-logic extraction. Use the Ask Dan Test to spot undocumented production logic before it hardens into brittle automation or confidently wrong AI-built software.
Inside this essay
Part 06 of 08
Process visibility is not decision clarity
Most automation failures are diagnosed at the code, tool, or AI layer. The deeper failure is older: teams automated a cleaned-up story about the workflow before they extracted the real decision logic.
Inside this essay
Part 07 of 08
Agents need reviewed logic
Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, and Copilot-centered workflows are fast builders, but they still guess when business rules stay trapped in summaries, tickets, and transcripts. A reviewable logic twin gives them something safer to build from.
Inside this essay
Part 08 of 08
The constraint moved upstream
Software production capacity is rising fast. The next constraint is the rate at which teams can extract, clarify, and maintain business logic before engineers and coding agents build from it.
Inside this essay