Last Tuesday I opened Neovim at nine and closed it after one. Four hours. I pressed i twice. The rest was j, k, Ctrl-d, /, gd, Ctrl-o, and a lot of sitting still. An agent had written a 380-line change across six files overnight. My job was to find out whether it was right. I…
Month: July 2026
Do You Still Read Books?
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 spring, nine years after the first one. Six hundred and fifty…
AI Won’t Turn Non-Builders Into Builders
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 won’t turn non-builders into builders. I watched the…
The Gatekeeper Generation
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 ORM and the connection pool, and he could not see down there….
Fable 5 Is Back. The AI Coding Market Already Moved On.
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 model went dark for everyone. API, Claude.ai, Bedrock, all of it. Gone. On…