Home on Eric Irwin

Borrowing from Team Topologies to Make Sense of Claude Agent Teams

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a habit I can’t turn off. Whenever I’m working on something — whether it’s organizing a project, structuring a team, or just figuring out how to approach a problem — my brain immediately goes to: what’s the optimal shape for this? What information needs to flow, and between whom? Where are the boundaries?

It’s the kind of thinking that Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais gave a name and a framework to with Team Topologies. If you haven’t read it, the short version is that it offers a set of mental models for how engineering teams should be structured — and not around org charts, but around the flow of value. How teams communicate, where cognitive load sits, what interaction modes make sense for a given type of work. It fundamentally changed how I think about engineering organizations, and honestly, it’s one of those frameworks that keeps paying dividends years after you first encounter it.

The Case for Making Your AI Tools Argue With Each Other

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve gotten pretty comfortable trusting LLM output. The answers sound authoritative. The code compiles. The reasoning feels right. And then we ship it. But the most dangerous thing an AI can do isn’t give you a wrong answer. The problem isn’t “AI is sometimes wrong.” It’s that we keep asking one model to be the authority.

That’s what pushed me into a little experiment: instead of using an LLM like an answer machine, what if I used it like a decision stress test?

The Real Bottleneck in AI Isn't the Model — It's Our Communication

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re living through one of the fastest paradigm shifts in modern computing. Tools are getting better, models are getting smarter, and the ecosystem is moving from prompt engineering toward something far more powerful: context engineering.

But even as the tooling evolves quickly it is clear that some people get extraordinary results out of AI tools… and others get diminishing returns.

And when you peel the layers back, the reason is surprisingly human. It’s almost always about how effectively they communicate with the machine and how unnatural that still feels for most of us.

The AI-First Engineering Pattern: How Persistent Context Turns Claude into a True Teammate

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Building a platform like Swoop means juggling a mobile app, dashboards, APIs, infrastructure, and — more recently — AI agents. Over time, I built a workflow using Claude Code that treats all of it as one intelligent workspace: a single place where code, data, operations, and testing are deeply connected.

The key insight: AI becomes genuinely useful when it shares your mental model of the system.

When architecture, tooling, and context are explicit, Claude stops acting like autocomplete and starts reasoning like a teammate who understands your entire environment. This isn’t about clever prompts — it’s about teaching your workspace to think in context.

The Quiet Evolution of AI Tools: From Autocomplete to Workflow Bridges

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AI is one of the most polarizing topics in engineering right now. For some, it represents a threat to jobs or a black box risk; for others, it’s the next great productivity revolution. But beneath the noise, there’s a more subtle — and in many ways more exciting — shift underway: the evolution of AI tools like Cursor and Claude into customizable workflow partners.

Instead of being just autocomplete engines, these tools are learning how to meet us exactly where we are. Through hooks, sub-agents, and local context, they’re becoming bridges across the many layers and abstractions engineers have to navigate daily.

Generative AI vs. Agents: A Simple Litmus Test

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing this because I’ve made the mistake myself. I assumed everything should be an agent. If there was a problem to solve, my first instinct was, let’s build an agent for that. It took running headfirst into the tradeoffs — performance, debugging headaches, and unnecessary complexity — for me to realize that not everything benefits from being agentic.

And honestly, this isn’t a new struggle. We’ve seen the same pattern with AI more broadly: reaching for it to solve problems that are often handled better with simpler, more traditional approaches. Now, agents and agentic systems are following the same trajectory — being turned to as the “solution” even when they’re not the right fit. Or at least not the immediate.

IDPs For The Rest of Us: Maximizing Impact When You Aren't a Tech Giant

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

At BackstageCon 2024, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to share how Quantum Metric has maximized the value of its Internal Developer Platform (IDP) by leveraging Backstage. For those who couldn’t attend, I’ve consolidated the key insights here in written format.

The presentation can be viewed here .

We will cover:

Our journey in rethinking platform strategy and selecting Backstage as our IDP.
An overview of custom plugins we’ve built, highlighting our approach to defining key metrics and validating their impact.
Key themes and takeaways that have been instrumental for our team and can provide value at any stage of your IDP journey.

Rethinking our Platform Strategy

Quantum Metric enables organizations to understand and prioritize what matters most by capturing real-time customer insights. With a rapidly growing product and customer base, maintaining efficiency and scalability while staying lean has always been a top priority.

Introducing the Quantum Metric Analytics Plugin for Backstage

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

At Quantum Metric, the concept of dog fooding, or using our own products to solve our problems, has been a cornerstone of our product development process.

Since the beginning of our journey with Backstage, our team has always valued a deeper understanding of user engagement and behavior on the platform. This approach has enabled us to leverage the power of our own product from the outset, offering us a window into both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the platform we are building. As our platform has grown and evolved, so has our commitment to refining the data that we capture.

The Power of a Monthly Newsletter

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by Will Larson’s approach to 5–15s, I set a goal for myself a little over a year ago: to initiate a recurring newsletter aimed at offering a glimpse into the ongoing progress and contributions of my team within our organization.

As I reflect on the last year, the value of this simple communication tool has extended far beyond my initial expectations. With that said, I wanted to share my experience of the benefits that one might expect from incorporating a monthly newsletter into your leadership strategy.

Simplify your Strategic Leadership Framework With These Four Components

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have been fortunate enough in my leadership roles to hit a point where the way in which I was operating was becoming less effective and I recognized I needed to make adjustments in order to allow my teams to be successful. I subtly noticed I was becoming the bottleneck across my teams and needed to operate on a higher level of abstraction in order to get out of my teams way.

System Models in Backstage

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

At Quantum Metric, our teams committed to leveraging Backstage within our Developer Experience Platform (or DXP as we refer to it) following a brief but convincing POC. We felt confident in it becoming a critical component within our Platform moving forward.

We wanted to share our experiences in the early stages of integrating Backstage as well as give some examples for why we felt that it was important to build a strong foundation to support our System Model.

Custom Autoscaling for GitLab Kubernetes Executors

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to share some really interesting work that our team at Quantum Metric was doing to improve the performance and reliability of our GitLab CI pipelines.

The intention of this article is to provide an overview of why and how our team decided to implement our own custom autoscaling for our GitLab CI jobs running on Kubernetes.

Introduction

Our engineering organization has evolved significantly over the past three years. We have experienced rapid growth within our teams as well as our customer base and we continue to improve how we are delivering value quickly and reliably to our customers.

About

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background

I was born and raised in Arizona and received my undergraduate degree at The Citadel , The Military College of South Carolina, where I graduated Cum Laude with a B.S. in Computer Science and a Minor in Management Information Systems in just three years.

After graduating, I returned to Arizona and earned my Masters of Science in Software Engineering from Arizona State University , with a focus on Distributed Systems.

Career

In March 2019, I began my current role at Quantum Metric in Denver, CO. I’ve been fortunate to work with incredibly talented engineers and innovative teams throughout my career, spanning companies like Carvana, CommercialTribe, and others across the Denver and Phoenix tech scenes.

Experience

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Quantum Metric

Senior Director of Engineering | Spring 2019 - Present | Denver, CO

Enthusiastic engineer, leader and learner with a passion for professional and personal development. I believe that highly functioning organizations start at their foundation. Optimizing for transparency ensures teams and individuals possess a deep understanding of larger organizational initiatives. I care deeply about continuous improvement to how teams build, release and iterate on products they own.

CommercialTribe

Site Reliability Engineer | Sr. Software Engineer | Fall 2016 - Spring 2019 | Denver, CO

Featured

Eric.Irwin@gmail.com (Eric Irwin) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Talks

IDPs For The Rest of Us: Maximizing Impact When You Aren’t a Tech Giant — My KubeCon talk on building an effective Internal Developer Platform without the resources of a tech giant.

Press

Inside the Engineering Teams Leading the Next Wave of AI Innovation — Featured in Built In’s look at how engineering teams are leveraging AI to build products more efficiently.
Originated by Spotify, Backstage Sparks a Platform Revolution — Eric’s KubeCon talk on how our engineering teams use QM to validate and measure platform impact.