2026-03-07 Notes

yesterday: 2026-03-03-notes

Happy Saturday, we're at the GWL and I figured I'd take a few minutes this morning to reflect on the last few weeks

Work

Cat Autonomy is going well for me, my team seems relatively pleased with the work and ideas I've brought to the table, and I've played a role in some pretty instrumntal changes. I have been piecing together more and more of a story, I'm not sure about Caterpillar specifically but maybe, about technical leadership and how a lack of it at the top level (C-suite, Execs, etc.) leads to long-lasting frustration and repetitive pain points at lower levels (ie. where I am). The reasons that I needed to make, or propose, all the changes I have is that a lack of leadreship has culminated over years into a sprawling mess of responsibilities, requests, deliverables, and a lack of a cohesive "thing" which was the original vision for the project I'm on now (I know this cause I was here when it started).

Agents

Agents are making it possible for me to to produce the amount of work I have been for the last 2 months. It feels like the future in many ways, a lot is unknown still but I need a write a follow-up on learning-how-to-agent. I'm not sure where I sit in agentic coding skills in the scope of the world, but at Caterpillar I am within episolon of 100% confident that I'm one of the most active and proficient agentic-tool-users (Specifically GitHub Copilot, but I am including peripheral things here - knowledge of context management, custom agents, harness engineering, etc). nexus has been serving me really well and that is about to warrant its own post too - I have had a few Caterpillar peeps reach out about using Nexus for themselves and although it's not there yet, it is coming together nicely.

Over the last 6 weeks I've come up with a platform idea, and stitched together/upgraded several existing solutions from the past 5 years, into a platform I'm calling "Forge". For the past 2 years there's been an internal effort to rebuild what I just recently consolidated, but that project has no users and is unstable AF... Just this week our leadership decided to ax taht project and put those developers on my thing. I've been struggling with this a little because I don't like to think that I have so much weight at Cat now as to meaningfully affect the work othe rpeople are doing. I like to build tools to affect how people work, but in this case I effecitvely killed a 2 year old project and there's more than 0 emotions to deal wtih. Overall the team doesn't seem too bent out of shape about it, but nonetheless the influence I see that I have, and it's continuing to increase, is somewhat daunting

Misc

At the Great Wold Lodge and having a blast, minus kids not sleeping great (which unfortunately makes having fun sometimes a near-breakdown-experience). We're hanging out with tbe BFFs and my best mate has recently become a Lead in his engineering firm. Proud of him for sure. I also am feeling acutely aware of a fact - that things change over time, and influence has lasting impacts.

Kids are up, time to sign off.