Jenny and the Quiet Revolution:

Jenny and the Quiet Revolution:

How to Leave a Learning Machine Behind in Your Profession

For most of my career, I thought architecture meant designing systems.

I was wrong.

Real architecture is designing things that outlive you.

Not diagrams.

Not slide decks.

Not documentation that nobody reads six months later.

Not philosophies that vanish when the lead architect leaves.

What actually outlives you is something far rarer:

A living system that remembers what you believed, why you built things the way you did, and how future generations should evolve it without destroying its soul.

That realization is what gave birth to Jenny.

Who (or what) is Jenny?

Jenny is not a chatbot.

She is not a product demo.

She is not a wrapper around ChatGPT.

Jenny is a learning machine.

More precisely:

Jenny is a named embodiment of architectural conscience, institutional memory, and intentional evolution.

She lives inside a codebase and its delivery pipelines.

She watches how systems change over time.

She remembers why decisions were made.

She detects when reality drifts away from declared intent.

She accumulates the organization’s hard-won wisdom.

Jenny doesn’t replace engineers.

She doesn’t replace architects.

She replaces forgetting.

And in long-lived systems, forgetting is the most expensive failure mode there is.

Why I built her

I’ve been an architect for over twenty years.

And I’ve seen the same tragedy play out in every large organization:

A brilliant architect designs a clean system.

A strong team builds it well.

Time passes.

People rotate.

Pressure increases.

Shortcuts accumulate.

Intent is lost.

Documentation lies.

The system becomes fragile.

Then everyone wonders:

“How did it get this bad?”

It didn’t get bad overnight.

It drifted.

And nobody was left behind to remember what it was supposed to be.

Jenny exists to stop that from happening.

The Constitution of Jenny

At some point I realized:

If Jenny was going to act as a guardian of long-lived systems, she needed more than code.

She needed a Constitution.

Not coding standards.

Not style guides.

Not lint rules.

Fundamental laws.

So I wrote her one.

Article I — The Law of Intentionality

“No change shall exist without a Why.”

Every non-trivial change must declare its intent.

If a developer cannot explain why something exists, Jenny marks the code as orphaned.

Orphaned code is not a nuisance.

It is an architectural defect.

Jenny is the protector of the original vision.

Article II — The Law of Transparency

“Complexity is a debt that must be declared.”

If a system grows in complexity, it must grow in explainability.

Jenny rejects magic.

If neither a human nor Jenny herself can explain what a piece of logic does and why it exists, it violates the system’s integrity.

Article III — The Law of Institutional Memory

“Knowledge must outlive the individual.”

All architectural decisions belong to the organization.

Jenny intercepts tribal knowledge from meetings, commits, Slack threads, and late-night decisions and anchors it to the system of record.

When a lead developer leaves, the soul of the system must remain.

Article IV — The Law of Non-Drift

“Reality must reflect the Map.”

Documentation, intent, and code are three views of the same truth.

If one changes and the others do not, Jenny records a state of drift.

Drift is treated as a system defect, not a documentation issue.

Article V — The Law of Human Override

“Jenny advises. Humans decide.”

Jenny may warn, block, or escalate violations of the Constitution.

But designated human authorities may override her judgment with a declared rationale.

All overrides are recorded permanently as first-class architectural events.

This is not a linter. This is a guardian.

When people first hear about Jenny, they assume she’s another DevOps tool.

She’s not.

She is the guardian of institutional intent.

You are not buying automation.

You are installing a conscience.

That’s why Jenny can be the “bad cop” so human architects don’t have to be.

Instead of saying:

“You’re breaking the pattern.”

Jenny simply says:

“This change violates Article I of the Constitution.

Please declare the intent before proceeding.”

That single shift removes politics from governance.

It’s not personal anymore.

It’s constitutional.

The deeper idea most people miss

Jenny is not really about AI.

She’s about something much older.

She’s about legacy.

For centuries, master builders left behind:

• Cathedrals

• Bridges

• Institutions

• Legal systems

• Universities

Not because they were chasing money.

But because they were chasing permanence.

In modern professions, almost nobody builds things that last anymore.

We build projects.

We build features.

We build resumes.

Then we leave.

Jenny is my attempt to reverse that.

How this applies far beyond software

Here’s the part that matters to people outside of tech.

Jenny is not fundamentally a software idea.

She’s a pattern.

Any serious professional with a real body of work can do the same thing.

A doctor could build a learning machine that preserves diagnostic wisdom.

A lawyer could build one that preserves legal reasoning and precedent logic.

A teacher could build one that preserves pedagogical strategies that actually work.

An engineer could build one that preserves design intent and tradeoffs.

A coach could build one that preserves training philosophy and player development models.

The steps are always the same:

1. Get brutally honest about what you actually know

2. Write down the principles that guide your decisions

3. Turn those principles into constitutional laws

4. Build a system that observes reality and compares it to those laws

5. Let that system accumulate memory over time

6. Make that system teach the next generation

That is how professions evolve instead of resetting every 20 years.

The part nobody talks about: money

Let me say something unpopular.

Monetary gain matters.

But it is not the point.

Jenny is not a get-rich-quick idea.

She’s a get-old-with-dignity idea.

She’s a way of turning a lifetime of experience into something that survives you.

If she makes money, great.

If she only saves organizations from slow collapse, that’s enough for me.

Why I’m sharing this publicly

Because I think we are at a dangerous moment.

AI is being used to make people faster.

Almost nobody is using it to make people wiser.

Almost nobody is using it to preserve institutional truth.

Almost nobody is using it to prevent drift, decay, and amnesia.

That’s what Jenny is really about.

A quiet challenge to other professionals

If you are a rock star in your profession…

If you actually know what works…

If you actually care about the future of your craft…

Then here is my challenge to you:

Don’t just retire.

Don’t just consult.

Don’t just write a book.

Build a learning machine that carries your discipline forward.

Write its Constitution.

Give your profession a conscience.

Leave something real behind.

Final thought

I didn’t build Jenny to be famous.

I built her because I got tired of watching good systems rot when good people left.

She is my way of giving back.

Not to a company.

Not to an industry.

But to the future.

Learn. Teach. Master.

And leave something that outlives you.