Shane Burrell
Skin in the Runtime book cover

Now on Amazon

Skin in the Runtime

Technical Judgment for Leaders in the AI Era

William Shane Burrell

Your engineers are shipping faster than ever. So why do outcomes feel worse? AI moved the constraint from typing to judgment. This book is for CTOs, VPs of engineering, directors, and the senior engineers about to become them.

Paperback $16.99 · Kindle $12.99 · Hardcover $24.99 coming

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

What's inside

AI did not remove the human constraint in software delivery. It moved it — from typing to judgment. Every chapter ends with a concrete artifact — a checklist, scorecard, or protocol — you can put to work the same week you read it.

  • Where AI-era delivery actually stalls: review capacity and contract ownership
  • Cognitive debt: what your team must still understand when AI writes the code
  • The metrics that prove AI adoption is working — and the ones that lie
  • The leadership-grade homelab: deliberate practice for technical judgment
  • Agent sprawl as the new shadow IT, and the platform discipline that contains it
  • Build versus rent when AI has repriced the ledger
  • Proof under pressure: the $14M migration, crisis leadership, and teams that own the runtime

Paperback, Kindle, and hardcover on Amazon →