Developer Insights — Dave Ballantyne

AI-assisted development that survives contact with reality.

AI accelerates output. It does not, by default, accelerate the kind of execution that remains inspectable, recoverable, and structurally legible to the team responsible for it.

This site is about the engineering side of that gap.

This is the canonical theorem of Continuity-Governed Execution Infrastructure (CGEI) — applied research by People Not Tech. Concept lineage with Duena Blomstrom.

Latest Writing

• The Architecture of Autonomy — surviving the PROMPT trap, dismantling SAND, engineering with GLASS

  The PROMPT trap, SAND and GLASS: why AI-assisted development survives or collapses on architecture, and why engineering discipline matters more, not less.

• GLASS vs SAND — the two architectures of AI-assisted development

  The technical framing that distinguishes safe AI-assisted engineering from accelerated incoherence.

• Why AI-assisted development collapses under pressure

  Operational scenes of AI-generated coherence becoming unrecoverable technical drift.

• Structural opacity — why black-box systems silently accumulate Execution Debt™

  The engineering cost of systems whose decision paths can no longer be reconstructed.

• Execution Integrity for engineers — recoverable-state engineering, not management language

  Why Execution Integrity is an engineering property of AI-assisted systems, not a slogan.

Dave's (mainly) SQL Archive

Before AI-assisted development, the work was SQL Server internals, query optimization and execution plans. Browse the archive → — 134 technical posts, 2009–2024, resurrected from now-defunct blogs and reproduced as proper pages with their original publication dates.

About this site

Developer Insights is the personal site of Dave Ballantyne, CTO. The role here is GLASS/SAND technical framing authority — originator of the GLASS and SAND framing for AI-assisted development. The framework that operationalises this distinction is Execution Integrity Infrastructure — applied research by People Not Tech. Operational deployment runs through Execution Pods at HumanAgents.io. Concept lineage with Duena Blomstrom.

For audio: the Developer Insights Podcast (DIP).

Latest episode