Two things happened to our industry at the same time, and I don’t think we’ve connected them yet. The first: the cost of creating code is asymptotically approaching zero. Code is not the differentiator anymore. You can argue about how close to zero we are, but not about the direction. The second comes from SignalFire’s State of Talent Report 2026. In big companies and small startups alike, the number of developers per engineering manager is approaching 15.

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We use RFC 7396 JSON Merge Patch across our public API. It’s simple, it’s well specified, and clients like it. JSON Merge Patch acts like a simple ‘diff’. The patch document mirrors the structure of the document you want to change. To add or update a field, you send the new value. To delete a field, you set the value to null. The rest stays as it was. Simple. Then we hit arrays.

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The newest person often sees the red flags first and says the least. I joined a team that called itself empowered. Very quickly, I saw that almost every meaningful step still needed stakeholder approval, and each approval could turn into a veto later. I noticed the pattern early, but because I was new, I assumed I was missing context. That everyone else understood something I did not.

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