Operational Decisions
8+ recent decisions
Clear Wolfgang for the UAE, cut the on-site window to week one, and hand the final pick to Wolford
Sep 23, 2026 · operational · medium95% confidence
Following the 9/16 decision to put a technical body on the ground in the UAE, Peter closed out the open questions in three moves across two days. He talked to Wolfgang, who wants to go. He asked Adam Jackson directly whether a German national can be sent and got a yes the same morning. He told Bjorn in the C-Suite Sync that he does not think the engineer needs to be there for the entire deployment - just the first week or so, when we are going to need to push a button. Then, when Chris Wolford raised Randy as an alternative, Peter said he is fine with it being Randy, that he does not mind, that it is 100 percent Wolford call, and attached the only real constraint: if it is Randy, tell Adam now so the security paperwork starts now for whoever is chosen.
People: Chris Wolford, Bjorn Hovland, Adam Jackson, Wolfgang Resch, Sarah Almaraz
Put a technical body on the ground in the UAE through Oct 5 rather than run the Core42 deployment fully remote
Sep 16, 2026 · operational · high87% confidence
The Core42 SOW landed the morning of Sep 15 and hardware arrives Sep 18 with a hard Oct 5 deployment date. The deployment was nominally supposed to be fully remote. Bjorn asked whether CIQ needs a body in the UAE just in case, and offered to go himself if there were safety concerns. Peter said he would be a lot more comfortable with someone there, framed it as belts and suspenders rather than a technical necessity, and made the case on a concrete mechanism: having somebody there who can physically push a button is different from having to do this without being able to push a button. He agreed with Wolford that if CIQ sends anyone it should be a technical person. Wolford named Godlove first pick and Wolfgang second; Peter took the assignment conversations himself and said he would have them that morning, including Arsalan on the support side. Bjorn funded business-class travel and a hotel through Oct 5, and declined Adam Jackson offer to ask the customer to cover flights. Peter also declined Bjorn offer to fly out personally and declined the suggestion of sending two people. At the Leadership Roundtable the day before, when Bjorn asked where they had netted out on sending somebody, Peter answered that they should.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Chris Wolford, Adam Jackson, Katie OMalley
Bound the NVIDIA driver auto-update ticket - 24 hours is the product ask, 30 days is the contractual floor
Sep 11, 2026 · operational · medium75% confidence
Brady brought a ticket asking engineering to move from manual to automatic NVIDIA driver updates, with a 24 hour target he said Justin and Nathan had already accepted with just prioritize it. Peter questioned whether that acceptance had been priced, then directed that both numbers be written into the ticket - 24 hours as product ask, 30 days as the contractual commitment - so engineering knows the real floor and can choose where between them to stop.
People: Brady Dibble, Brian Dawson, Justin Haynes, Nathan Blackham
Push speed-over-perfect down into the Justin org and ask him to produce a visible failure that goes unpunished
Sep 11, 2026 · operational · high89% confidence
Peter opened the Justin 1:1 by reconstructing his own discomfort with how he had handled pushback after a talk on AI usage - the pushback was about corner cases, and Peter realised his own answer had been weak. He then asked Justin to reiterate the speed-over-perfection mantra to his people, and escalated the ask: go fast enough that a real mistake happens, so Peter can visibly decline to punish it. He paired this with a demand for QA automation investment rather than manual QA, and set up a next-week whiteboard exercise: what would have to be true to double throughput, what breaks, and what does it cost to stop each breakage.
People: Justin Haynes, Nathan Blackham, Jamin, Ryan Smith
Put the NVIDIA Spark bootable-Rocky USB on Justins org - and size it to carry meeting materials
Sep 3, 2026 · operational · low61% confidence
On 9/2 Arthur Tyde asked whether CIQ could produce a Rocky-on-NVIDIA-Spark artifact for events. Peter confirmed the current Spark version of Rocky already is a bootable USB stick and called it super doable, then named the constraints and the owner. Constraint one: the image he holds is old, the current one sits with someone who is out, and he expects to have it in a couple of weeks. Constraint two: it only runs on an NVIDIA Spark - a Mac or other target would need different packaging and drivers, which is a separate ask. He then allocated the work outright: Justins org can build something. He also specified the form factor rather than leaving it open - small ones are fine, like a 128 gig would allow us to include additional meeting materials - turning a bare boot stick into a carrier for collateral.
People: Arthur Tyde, Justin Haynes
Deliver the AI-spend message myself at an engineering all-hands instead of letting the AI committee write a policy
Aug 28, 2026 · operational · medium77% confidence
In the 2026-08-27 Ryan Smith 1:1, Ryan argued that the next AI committee meeting should produce a company-wide best practice on AI spend - consensus around spend, do not use Fable for everything, be self-aware of usage. Peter declined the policy framing but conceded the underlying point: the conversation has to happen and has to be delivered directly to engineering rather than routed through a committee or left to individual managers. He committed to an engineering all-hands the following week and flagged it verbally for capture in the moment. He scoped it explicitly to engineering, excluding Ryan own organization.
People: Ryan Smith, Chris Wolford, Steve Wallace, Steve Moody
Diagnose every AI overage case individually and apply the remedy that case calls for - without squashing AI usage
Aug 28, 2026 · operational · medium81% confidence
Facing an AI token run rate heading toward roughly 3 million dollars a year, with the top ten spenders accounting for about 95 percent of it, Peter refused both a spend cap and a single blanket fix. He directed each manager to work out why the overage is occurring for their own people, case by case, and to do whatever is appropriate for that specific cause - with the standing constraint that the answer must never be to suppress AI usage. He gave different answers for the cases he had already looked at himself: one engineer at roughly 60k a month is justified and was told to keep going; two others at roughly 100k a month between them are low-return and their manager was already digging in; Zorina team burned 12k in August purely because they were hitting the Claude API directly rather than the enterprise plan, so Justin Haynes action is a plan switch. Peter also declined Ryan Smith push to have the AI committee issue a company-wide best-practice policy on spend.
People: Justin Haynes, Chris Wolford, Ryan Smith, Nathan Blackham, Steve Wallace
Shut down department-heads as an intake path for engineering work - I raised it to product, they will either ask for it or they will not
Aug 28, 2026 · operational · medium89% confidence
In a #department-heads thread about who owns and maintains the C3 RPMs and about hardware certification playbooks, Ryan Smith offered to tweak Gauntlet to run certification playbooks and asked for hardware to be sent to him. Peter cut it off directly: this channel is not how work gets in front of engineering. He restated the path he had actually used - he asked who maintains it, got back currently nobody, and took the follow-up question of whether it should be publicly visible to product, where Brady Dibble owns it. If product asks for it, it becomes a project and gets the right people and the right hardware support.
People: Ryan Smith, Nathan Blackham, Brady Dibble, Dave Dickerson, Greg Kurtzer