Vol. II · No. 305
Established 2025

smallweb

Sunday, November 1, 2026
174 writers in the library
Tech · 2 shelves
TechLife

Sean Goedecke.

Software engineering and personal reflections.

Recent essays

30 of 104

Fast and slow ways to improve your reputation

Elegance and intelligence are anticorrelated

You can just ask AI to do things

Getting good at AI takes time and practice

Don't anthropomorphize big tech companies

Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages

Laypeople support technical fields for technology, not art

What requirements don't you have?

Writing is no longer proof of work

AI is driving a boom in modestly successful software projects

Software engineers don't get to be Luddites about AI

Don't diagnose your opponents

Software's centaur age may last decades

How to read code

Superpersuasion will look like bribery

Shipping is the foundation

Do not build the LLM torture factory

Human-AI partnerships are for alignment, not capability

Advice to a beginning software engineer

You should all be asking way more questions

System One models like Jev can train their own replacements

Grit your teeth and ship it

Two techniques for working with System One models

Jev means structured output is interesting again

Tell agents the why, not just the how

Slow developer experience will bottleneck fast models

AI is breaking our proxies for expertise

Don't build tools for AI agents

They really do think AI might kill everyone

Why we should anthropomorphize AI agents