Why did David Fowler burn out as an architect on the .NET Core rewrite?

David Fowler says that early in the .NET Core rewrite he tried to code review every single change from a team of about 30 engineers. Within a year that had burnt him out, and he had to learn to trust people, decide what mattered and stop blocking merges over changes that were imperfect but not urgent.

• The rewrite rebuilt the package manager, runtime and libraries from scratch.
• Fowler calls the freedom to build whatever the team thought right both amazing and terrifying.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Ryan Peterman (2026-10-21). Read the whole episode summary →

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