# David Crawshaw (crawshaw.io)

David Crawshaw runs crawshaw.io. He's a co-founder of exe.dev (a nine-person team using agents heavily for product work), an ex-Tailscale engineer, and earlier worked at Google. His writing focuses on what changes when agents become useful collaborators — small-team dynamics, the breakdown of corporate review processes, and the operational machinery that has to compensate.

The May 2026 post [[agent-principal-agent-problem]] is one of the cleanest articulations of why agents make code review fail: it's not workload, it's the collapse of the effort signal that low-trust review depended on. The conclusion ("until someone develops processes that scale agent use in low-trust environments, small teams have a force multiplier big teams don't have, ship while you can") is the kind of thing that lands harder if you've spent time at a BigCo trying to merge anything.

Not to be confused with [[exe-dev-blog|blog.exe.dev]], the company blog. Crawshaw's site is personal and diagnostic; the company blog runs to worked practice reports, and [[claude-is-not-a-compiler]] (Josh Bleecher Snyder, July 2026) is effectively the constructive answer to the problem [[agent-principal-agent-problem]] posed here.

## Ingested articles
- [[agent-principal-agent-problem]] — 2026-05 — Why agents broke code review by collapsing the effort signal between contributor and reviewer