Essays on AI, engineering and Rails
Honest takes on code, AI, and what actually works
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6–10 minutesI Still Miss Writing Code
Read essay →: I Still Miss Writing CodeThere is a specific kind of quiet I have been thinking about lately. It is late. The office is empty, or the house is finally asleep. There is a problem on the screen that refuses to be solved, and for…
Recent essays
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Everyone Is an “Engineer” Now, and Nobody Knows What Anyone Does
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…
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The Engineering Age That’s Ending, and the One We Haven’t Named Yet
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.…
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Open Source Security Is Everyone’s Problem Now
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…
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Vibing Fatigue: Why Tracking AI Usage Is the Wrong KPI
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…
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Almost Solved Is the Most Dangerous Phase in Engineering
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…
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Complexity Is Never Eliminated. It Is Only Relocated.
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…
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“Done” Is Not Merge: Why Your Definition of Done Is Probably a Lie
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…
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AI Made Learning Feel Pointless. That’s Exactly When It Matters Most.
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…
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The Training Data Paradox: What Happens When AI Replaces the Engineers Who Trained It
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.…
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