Every engineering team is battling the same problem. We call it Velocity Sickness. It's the disconcerting feeling that you're moving fast but not having the impact you expect. It's affecting individuals, teams and especially leaders.

It looks like: - Too many PRs to merge. - Brainfry and burnout. - Engineers running in different directions. - Critical decisions being made by agents.

The last one is the most dangerous. At its core, software engineering is about two things: (1) what decisions matter for my system? and (2) making those decisions. When you let agents make critical decisions, you lose ownership of your system and product.

You solve these problems with Ref.

The art of modern software engineering is balancing pre-work vs re-work.

Our existing tools jump us straight into implementation and re-work. Ref is a tool for the decision layer and works with all your existing implementation tools and agents.

And because this is hackernews, I want to be super clear: I am NOT saying “never read the code”. Not yet, anyways.