The Book of Seven Contexts

Something is happening in software engineering. The tools got unreasonably powerful. The pace got unreasonably fast. You were handed a handful of half-working AI agents and told to be ten times more productive by Tuesday, and in roughly the same breath informed that you might be replaced in the near future anyway. Every morning a LinkedIn post tells you that a company somewhere has replaced three engineers with an AI. Every article mentions someone who claims to be shipping five times more. You might be one of those people, or you might be the person wondering, quietly, if the whole profession has moved on without you. The Book of Seven Contexts is for the developer sitting with that feeling. It is a book about how to stop feeling it — not by working harder, not by switching tools again, and not by adopting the particular prompt a stranger on the internet swears by this week. By doing something much older and much quieter instead: working with a method. Miyamoto Musashi wrote The Book of Five Rings at the end of his career, when he had spent decades quietly thinking about what separates the master swordsman from everybody else with a sword. His answer was not a better technique. His answer was a strategy — a set of principles about timing, distance, and attention that made the technique follow. This is that book, for our craft, for this century, for our own unreasonable tools. Blake Tullysmith has spent years developing and teaching the method this book contains. Before software he served in the United States Air Force Security Forces, a background which shows up in his writing as an affection for procedure, a distrust of theatre, and a steady voice under conditions that tend to make other people loud. He lives in Santa Rosa, California. He is, like you, tired of the noise. This book will make you less tired. It will also, by the end, have quietly returned something to you that you may not have realized you'd lost — which is the feeling of being good at what you do.