Honest takes on code, AI, and what actually works in software engineering.
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…
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…
The most dangerous lie in software engineering is a two-word status update: “It’s done.” In most teams, done means the pull request was merged. The CI pipeline turned green. The ticket moved to the right column on the board. Someone wrote “Done” in Slack, mayb…
A week ago my blog post got noticed by developers. I got so many messages and there was a recurring theme. They feel helpless and anxious with the ever growing AI dominance in writing code that might not be perfect but it is almost good enough in many cases. B…
There is a question hiding in plain sight behind every celebration of AI-generated code, every prediction that developers are obsolete, every LinkedIn post about building an app 100x faster with a prompt. It is a question that almost nobody in the current hype…
Yes, writing code is easier than ever. AI assistants autocomplete your functions. Agents scaffold entire features. You can describe what you want in plain English and watch working code appear in seconds. The barrier to producing code has never been lower. And…
I learned this the hard way while working with Claude Code. AI looks at your existing code and copies the patterns it finds. If you start with clean code, the rest stays clean. If you start messy, the problems pile up faster than any human team could create th…
In my previous post on WebMCP, I covered what WebMCP is and why it matters. The response told me something important: developers do not want another think piece about the future of the web. They want to know how to actually build with it. So this is the practi…
At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said something that landed like a grenade across the technology industry. In an interview with The Economist, he claimed that AI models could do “most, maybe all” of what soft…
A new kind of logic is spreading through developer communities, startup circles, and engineering Slack channels. It goes something like this: why pay a monthly subscription for software someone else built when you now have access to AI coding assistants powerf…
Every methodology has boundaries. Waterfall fails when requirements change frequently. Agile struggles with fixed-scope contracts. TDD is awkward for exploratory prototyping. No approach works everywhere, and pretending otherwise leads to poor outcomes. ADD is…
Software companies are dead. Just nobody told them. Or so everyone keeps saying. LinkedIn is flooded with Claude Code hype. Cursor is “changing everything.” Every founder on your feed is screaming that developers will be redundant by Q2. The revolution is here…
ADD is not a replacement for existing development methodologies. It is a complement to them. Teams already practicing Test-Driven Development, Behavior-Driven Development, or Agile workflows have a head start with ADD because these methodologies share underlyi…
The ADD cycle is consistent across contexts: Specify, Generate, Evaluate, Integrate. But how you apply each phase changes depending on what you are building and where you are building it. Greenfield projects offer freedom that legacy codebases do not. Refactor…