Fangirl Fiercely.
I ran into someone out in the wild who I had met previously after a talk she gave at a conference. I thought she was impressive…
Latest from the Gang
Strong opinions from the strongest players in the business.
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We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming…
I Have a Brain Science Degree and I Wasn’t Listening to My Own Brain This is a public service announcement, and the person who most needs…
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No Such Thing As Unskilled Labor: Further Ironies, Part II
This is the second part of our three-part series “Further Ironies” (behold, Part I) that discusses generalization, specialization, and how we keep getting it all wrong.…
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Anchoring Our Mental Model
How we build individual and shared understanding of software, and what changes when AI agents write the code. I remember being on a high floor down…
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“Robot” Is A Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not A Robot
The most effective way to nerd snipe a roboticist is to present them with a controversial definition of a “robot”
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The Generalist’s Bargain: Further Ironies, Part I
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy,…
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Robots Saved My Life
This post is going to be a departure from the “normal” content (what’s normal anyway?) we have posted, but I wanted to do something a little…
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A Meditation On Peak
Here on the “selling you stuff” side of Amazon, we experience the ebbs and flows of the US retail calendar like anyone else who sells stuff.…
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Context vs Direction
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why people get frustrated with each other. There are infinitely many reasons this can happen, but…
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It’s Not a Bug. It’s How the Building Runs.
I’ve had engineers come back to me more than once with a bug they want to close out. The version I remember best went something like…
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It Is Always the Time for Vision
Why vision matters now. Recently someone said to me, “Now is not the time for vision.” This statement gets the relationship between uncertainty and vision backwards.…
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The Myth of Collaborative Robotics
In the 8 years I’ve worked on products enabling collaborative applications of robots, there’s been one pervasive assumption from folks receiving them. They want the robots…
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Tina’s Hints For Writing Gud
tl;dr – Oh goddammit. It’s all outcomes, all the way down. Ahhh, a writing advice post! Truly, the least welcome professional development reading out there, with…
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The Problem with Personas
I have struggled with personas for most of my career. Not because I think they’re useless, I actually really like personas. I’ve used everything from specific…
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Every Pirate Captain Captains Pirates Differently
Today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, and that gives me an excuse to yet again give everyone the good news about the gay pirates…
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Everyone Hit Their Numbers. The System Didn’t Move.
The night before the on-site, six of us went to dinner. Forty people were flying in the next morning to spend two days working on one…
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Service Message: September Updates
Kari has been kicking ass on the site. First, she cleaned up my painfully austere aesthetics and made our site a lot more enjoyable to read…
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That’s Not An Exception Path
Wanna know why that cool new thing crashed and burned when you put it in the field? The renders, promo videos, spreadsheets, and live demo all…
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Principles of Anchor Engineering
Building software at agent speed with human judgement I have often seen one engineer get much faster with AI coding agents; then adding a second engineer…
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Nobody Asks the Hard Question Anymore
The AI builder/non-builder split is a measurement failure, and there’s data Somewhere in the last two years, a line got drawn down the middle of the…
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Mythology In The Technical World
Don’t worry, we’re not going to be carrying flower-strewn portraits of Steve Jobs around in the streets today. It’s a slow burn but it’s worth it.…
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Commodification: The Race To Zero
Steve Crowe of The Robot Report has been following Teradyne’s adventures in IP protection this year, most recently noting their second foray into court against the…
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Why They’re Gross
Likely my second-most career-limiting belief, right behind refusing to make the tools of war. This is the spicy one where I’m planting my flag because it…
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A Dishwasher Is A Robot
One of my favorite ways to troll roboticists is to claim, very loudly, that “a dishwasher is a robot”. It’s a great litmus test for how…
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Hit Dogs Bark
So a couple weeks ago the FCC dropped a National Security Determination and I had to go home, make popcorn, open the last of the random…
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Move Fast and Break Accountability
The further you are from the outcomes of a decision, the easier it is to make a bad call. It’s a natural consequence of large systems…
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Amazon’s Writing Culture Is Eating Itself
Faster document production is putting us into a decision quality doom spiral. Let’s talk about how two trends are killing us cognitively and what to do…
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We need to talk about humanoid robots.
Humanoid robot shipments are up in 2026, there’s a multiplicity of vendors out there, and high production demo videos abound. Yet, no one’s asking the most…
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Tina’s Maxims
This post was adapted and updated from my original posted on Medium.com in 2022. I’d like to share the maxims I have developed over the years…
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Hello, world.
A place for the Robot Girl Gang to share things that The World Needs To Know.