There's a notion that the To watch a machine produce reasonable answers to questions of all kinds as quickly as a slot machine spits out winnings is a disquieting thing. But my mind races to find the narrowing sliver of purpose that has always eluded me. If work is the thing you do to distract yourself from thinking about purpose, and work is being consumed by an automaton, there are fewer and fewer places to hide. I don't think there's a good answer to purpose yet - our minds aren't capable of...
Comprehension Debt
AI has dramatically accelerated how quickly we can write software. Entire features can appear in minutes. But this speed introduces a new risk that traditional engineering practices were never designed for. The real danger isn’t just technical debt. It’s As At the same time, The result is a dangerous feedback loop. Traditional technical debt accumulates slowly and heresy spreads. To manage this new reality, engineering teams need a stronger foundation for AI-driven systems. In an AI-assisted...
Engineering and Product Management
A product manager walks into a planning meeting with a feature idea. The spec is clear, the mockups look good, and the request seems straightforward. An engineer reads it and immediately starts seeing problems. The feature touches three fragile services, the edge cases are unclear, and the timeline feels optimistic. Neither person is wrong, but the conversation quickly turns tense. The PM feels like engineering is blocking progress. The engineer feels like product is ignoring the realities of th...
Craftsmanship vs. Abstraction
We remake ourselves over our lifetime, usually as a result driven by personal change. Sometimes it comes from shifts in our own lives, and sometimes from inspiration we feel compelled to pursue. Either way, it tends to be localized to an individual journey. What is happening right now feels different. This is a shift on a national, and possibly global, scale, one that demands change regardless of our personal feelings about it. This is especially true for software developers, in part because the...
The Strange Side-Effect of AI Coding
One of the weirdest things about using AI to write software isn’t the speed, the convenience, or the “oh wow it actually worked” moments. It’s the fact that-for the first time ever - we get a shockingly clear picture of what it In a traditional setup, you ask a team to add a feature like “generate a social graph image that combines multiple product photos into one.” The team looks at it, throws some points on the ticket, and off you go. Maybe it’s an 8-pointer. If you’re lucky, you’ve got at le...