Viljami Kuosmanen
Distinguished Engineer at epilot.cloud. Maintainer of openapistack.co, used by AWS, GitHub, IBM, Intel, and SAP. Author of the Product Engineer Manifesto. Writes about product engineering, AI-augmented teams, and running an engineering org from the inside.
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August 18, 2026
We Locked Ourselves Out of Production
A few months back an engineer was setting up a build pipeline with an AI coding agent. The agent held...
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May 15, 2026
I'm Changing my Title from Head of Engineering
After 5 years as Head of Engineering at epilot, I'm switching my title to Distinguished Engineer. Here's why, and what stays the same.
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April 13, 2026
Our Entire Company Ships Code Now. 40 PRs from Non-Engineers in 60 Days.
In February, I opened our entire codebase to the company. PMs, designers, projects, customer success,...
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February 4, 2026
We Made Coding Agents Actually Reliable By Fixing One Thing
Last week, Vercel published research showing that giving coding agents a compact index of your...
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October 1, 2025
Five Years In: Building a Place Worth Staying
It's been 5 years since I joined epilot. The next chapter isn't about shipping more features, quicker. It's about building a place worth staying.
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June 9, 2025
A Product Engineer's Letter to PMs
As product engineers, we're sharing the manifesto not as a critique of your role, but as a challenge to ourselves. Don't let us off the hook.
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June 9, 2025
A Product Engineer's Letter to Designers
Designers are like the north star: something to strive towards in terms of creativity, great taste and user empathy. We want to be closer to design, not to replace it.
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April 8, 2025
Dealing with Pushback to Product Engineering
I was recently confronted by a product engineer colleague here at epilot, frustrated with some of his...
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October 13, 2024
How I Got Product Engineering Wrong
If you've seen my posts lately you've probably seen a lot of talk about Product Engineers: software...
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September 26, 2024
Everything Is a Bet
Everything is a bet. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you start making smarter bets. Here's why embracing uncertainty isn't just smart, it's necessary.
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July 9, 2024
Bullshit Tech Roles (satire)
In any sufficiently well-funded or otherwise successful tech company, a set of new roles will...
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June 4, 2024
The Product Engineer Checklist
How to Think Like a Product Engineer
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February 29, 2024
What is a Product Engineer?
Not Just Coders, but builders...
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February 15, 2024
After 3 years: Bets I made as Head of Engineering rewriting the epilot SaaS – worth it?
In this post, we take a look back at some of the most influential decisions I implemented early on in...
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January 22, 2023
How we do engineering @ epilot
Ever since open-sourcing our core Engineering Principles back in January 2021, I regularly get asked...
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June 17, 2022
First year as Head of Engineering @epilot - Killing the Legacy Monolith
This post is a personal account of my experience at epilot.cloud and our journey rebuilding our...
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December 17, 2020
API First: How Teams Collaborate on Software Design
TL;DR: APIs are the single most useful design tool for teams collaborating on software. Teams who...
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June 12, 2020
Testing React With Jest and OpenAPI mocks
Kent C. Dodds recently wrote a very interesting post calling an end to mocking window.fetch when...