Honest takes on code, AI, and what actually works in software engineering.
A developer asked me that on a call in June. Not sarcastically. He asked it the way you would ask someone who still develops film. I had mentioned I picked up the second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications. Kleppmann and Riccomini shipped it this…
Someone showed me their AI-built SaaS last week. Looked clean. Demo worked. They asked me if they could quit their job. I asked what happens when a user signs up tomorrow and the password reset email never arrives. Long pause. That pause is the whole story. AI…
A developer at a fintech client lost three days to a reconciliation job that was silently dropping records under load. He had shipped eleven features in four months. Real output, not demo output. But this bug lived below the framework, somewhere between the OR…
On June 12, the US government told Anthropic to pull Claude Fable 5. Three days after it launched. The order said no foreign nationals could touch it, including Anthropic’s own foreign employees, and since nobody could verify nationality on every request, the…
A developer with 20 years on the job told me something last week. His old burnout used to make sense. Eight hours of code. Brain fried. Go home. Sleep. Repeat. Predictable. His new burnout is harder to describe. He asks AI to do something. He reads what it pro…
Is AI Quietly Contracting the World Economy? A Quebec translator I read about made roughly six figures in 2023. By late 2025 her work requests had dried up. Total earnings for the year barely cleared €8,000. She is forty-four years old and watching her career…
The Email That Started This Post A friend who is a founder sent me a Telegram message last month. “We’re three engineers. We have an AI feature to ship by Q3. Everyone says Python. Should I just give up on Rails?” He had a working Rails 8 app. Auth done. Billi…
Someone finally named the thing. There’s a word now for the work I’ve been doing for the last two years without a vocabulary for it. The middle loop. Supervisory engineering. The thing that sits between writing code and shipping it. The thing that didn’t exist…
A CTO’s field guide to the 2026 AI job title theater, with a companion reference guide covering all 40 roles. I have been a CTO for most of my adult life. I have hired, fired, onboarded, mentored, and occasionally been forced to explain to finance why a “Senio…
The best engineers I know write less code than they did two years ago. They ship more. Everyone wants the clean story. AI replaces developers. AI makes developers 10x. Juniors are cooked. Juniors are saved. Pick a side. The reality is messier. Big Tech new gra…
Two weeks ago, a North Korean state actor compromised the lead maintainer of Axios and published malicious versions to npm. The library has roughly 100 million weekly downloads. The poisoned packages were live for about three hours before anyone noticed. Three…
A developer I know got pulled into a “productivity review” last month. Not because their output dropped. Because their AI tool usage was below the team average. Their manager wanted to know why they weren’t using AI for coding enough. Not why their code had fe…
Everyone agrees AI is transforming how we write code. Adoption is through the roof, productivity metrics look promising, and a growing chorus of voices insists we are months away from this whole thing being "solved." They are probably wrong. Not because AI is…
COBOL moved complexity from machine instructions to business logic specification. 4GLs moved it from code to data modeling. No-code moved it from programming to workflow configuration. LLMs are moving it from syntax to verification. The complexity never disapp…