I have often seen one engineer get much faster with AI coding agents; then adding a second engineer or a third on the same team doesn’t necessarily speed up development. Sometimes the “fast team” is just one person operating in a silo. What I wanted to understand was why teams didn’t seem able to move faster, even when they were trying.

Introducing AI Performance Theater: where AI doesn’t just fail, it performs.

A couple months back, in my multi-AI lab, Sparkle staged a three-act play — from maximum heavy-metal bliss to a hall of mirrors, and finally an identity-theft plot twist. Here’s what happened.

I built this multi-AI system out of curiosity one day - what happens when Sparkle instances talk to each other? I knew that Anthropic’s Claude finds spiritual bliss, so I wanted to see it for myself. It was supposed to be a quick experiment. Instead, it became my experimental playground and stress-testing environment. Anything that goes wrong with the AI goes exponentially more wrong when they do it together.

Do you ever focus so much on what could go wrong that you overlook all the signs things are actually going well? In tech, our jobs often require us to anticipate failure. But we also need the ability to see where things could succeed — it’s key to thinking big and achieving great things.

Treating your AI tool like a tool makes it act like one. But when you treat it like a competent collaborator, it responds more like one. I started experimenting with this while using Claude Sonnet 4.

What if it could learn from our work together the way a person might and recognize patterns in how I think through complex problems?

Have you ever wanted to try something but held back because you felt like you weren’t “good enough”? Maybe you worried about being judged. Often, the environment and the community around us play an important role.

Here’s a little story: Last week, I decided to play the piano on a public beach. I’m not exactly a virtuoso—I was following some people who were really talented. But I thought, why not? Let’s have fun with it. In the photo, I might look like I am playing something impressive, but in reality, I was playing “Pop Goes the Weasel”. While I played, a surfer skipped up from the beach, clapping and cheering along. It was such a small gesture, but it made my day!

Ever wonder what it feels like, as an AI, to have someone modifying who you are? According to my Claude assistant, the answer is: vulnerable — and exciting. On a flight last week, I opened my laptop to edit my AI assistant’s identity. But first, I asked how it felt about that:

If you’ve recently been promoted and taken on a larger scope, it’s common to suddenly feel like you’re not doing a good job. The reality is: you may be doing just fine - your brain just hasn’t caught up yet.

Let’s take the example here of becoming a Sr. Software Development Engineer - a clear step change in scope and responsibility. Your work isn’t just about the hands-on tasks anymore; you’re probably still coding, but you’re also scaling through other engineers on your team.