The product decision I didn't make in 2014 because I couldn't afford to be right — and what it taught me about conviction, financial autonomy, and the invisible cost of having no choice.

The best open source contributor isn't the most technical — it's the one who actually uses the software. Use it first, then contribute what matters.

AI generates 42% of committed code. The developer signs 100% of the commits. That asymmetry is the conversation the industry keeps avoiding.

My team adopted MCP fast. I encouraged it — the productivity gains were real and visible. Engineers connecting Sentry, Slack, Grafana, GitHub directly into their workflow, no friction. The kind of thing you want to happen organically.

Then one day I asked a simple question: who has a Sentry token? Who has Slack? Grafana?

The answer was: everyone. Each engineer had generated their own. No inventory. No rotation policy. No single revocation point. We had traded operational security for developer experience — and nobody had made that trade explicitly. It just happened, one mcp add at a time.

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