Long-form pieces on selling complex technology to people whose job is to doubt you: engineers, security teams, and federal buyers.
In 2020 I co-wrote a vendor white paper on securing video surveillance systems. Every question it asked was about how a device was configured. None asked what the device was or who built it — and that omission was already federal procurement law. Software supply chain tooling is repeating it now: configuration is visible from the network, provenance is not, and products measure what they can see.
Developers have adopted AI coding tools almost universally while trusting them less than they did a year ago, and only about half consistently review what those tools produce. In commercial engineering that mismatch costs a bad quarter. In federal software it lands on the authorization package. Why SBOMs cannot close the gap, why provenance labeling answers the wrong question, and why the adoption problem is a trust problem before it is a tooling problem.