Introducing: SICKO MODE

"A city is well-fortified which has a wall of Spartans instead of brick." — Lycurgus of Sparta

The phalanx dominated ancient Greek warfare, not by inventing new weapons, but by revolutionizing how soldiers worked together—turning individual fighters into an unstoppable unit.

In that tradition, SICKO MODE introduces a new paradigm of AI-assisted software development: it isn't about chasing the dragon of structural advantages in your codebase. Instead, SICKO MODE is about defining a set of practical tactics that deliver aggressive, repeatable results. Just as the phalanx outmaneuvered older methods of warfare, SICKO MODE empowers teams to move faster and deliver more by focusing on developer skills, rather than the ever-shifting landscape of interchangeable languages, frameworks and tools.

• Structural advantages used to be the way to accelerate velocity - choice of framework, choice of libraries, using clean code to make conventions clear and promote fast iteration. Having a team that cares about the product and delivery. Those days are dead.
• While the full advantages of AI development are still emerging, my experience with it shows a couple things:
  • SDD is just prompts you check in. <- There's some dream that

"planning, analysis, design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance"

• Introducing SICKO MODE. There are a few core tenets to SICKO MODE:

1. Structural advantages in your codebase matter less now.

• 5 years ago, a codebase written in COBOL with 10,000 lines of codes would never be able to switch to python in order to use a suite of libraries that removes 9,800 lines of that code.
• SDD sucks. Good luck with that. The underlying technology has assured variation that causes risk to compound the larger your context and . SICKO MODE accepts that structure of code is not the source of advantage. The advantage is the strength of the phalanx. people who can operate fast and

1. Perfect is too slow. Perfect is
2. Frameworks live as . Tactics are more important than frameworks.