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Left of the Loop
When AI writes the code, shared understanding becomes the scarce resource.
This book is 80% completeLast updated on 2026-08-09
AI made implementation cheap and shared understanding scarce. This is the book about how teams should adapt the process.
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About the Book
AI made implementation cheap, and that changed what teams need from each other. Implementation used to be the medium through which shared understanding got built. People sat in code together, and the friction of that work taught them what the system was for, not just how it ran. Agents remove that medium, and the understanding it used to transfer doesn't happen anymore unless a team makes it happen on purpose.
Left of the Loop is about that shift. It argues that the scarce resource in an AI-augmented team is no longer implementation capacity, it's shared understanding, and that shared understanding has to be built deliberately now instead of arriving as a byproduct of writing code together.
The book's central mechanism is the Spec Session, a whole-team practice that inherits its content from refinement and its mechanics from mob programming, run when work arrives rather than on a sprint boundary. It's mob programming with the artifact moved upstream, from code to spec.
I wrote this because I kept hearing the same pushback from a colleague: why do I need the team, I can write the spec myself in ten minutes. That question runs through every chapter. This book is my answer to it, and an argument that the teams who protect constructive friction, not the ones who optimize it away, are the ones who will still understand their own systems a year from now.
The full draft is complete and public at leftoftheloop.dev
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About the Author
Simon Schrottner
Simon Schrottner is a software engineer who has spent more than a decade working on the tools other engineers build on top of. He maintains OpenFeature, including its flagd implementation, and contributes as a CNCF and AAIF Ambassador. He speaks about OpenFeature and the systems around it at conferences across Europe and beyond.
Left of the Loop grew out of a blog series argued in public, post by post, stress-tested by readers who pushed back before any of it became a book. The failures in it are his own. Working things out in public is still how he prefers to do it.
He lives in Austria and writes at schrottner.at.
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