Front matter
How This Book Was Made
Written openly, by pairing the author's experience with an AI model — and disclosed as a matter of principle.
This book was written by pairing a human with an AI, and it seems right to say so plainly at the start.
The idea, the argument, and the structure are the author’s, and so is the experience the book draws on — two decades spent building on the edge, in the cloud, and now with AI inside a large engineering organization. The author directed the work throughout: deciding what the book would claim, what belonged in each chapter and what did not, steering the research, correcting the drafts, and making the final call on every page. He read the whole of it and stands behind it.
The drafting, and much of the research assistance, were done in collaboration with an AI system — Anthropic’s Claude. The model helped turn direction into prose, gather and organize sources, and move quickly through a large, structured project. It was a tool in the author’s hands, not the author.
Two commitments follow from that. First, the ideas that matter belong to the researchers and builders whose work this book rests on; they are credited in the references at the end of every chapter, and any mistakes are the author’s alone. Second, everything here is the author’s personal view and experience — not official guidance from BMW or any employer.
There is a fitting symmetry in admitting this. The book argues that the way forward is to pair human judgment with AI — openly, and well — to deliver things you could not have delivered as quickly on your own. This book was made in exactly that way. It is, in a small way, an example of its own thesis.
— Hugo Lerias