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. But one question stood out more…
Category: AI
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. It is a question that almost nobody in the current hype cycle is asking, and it may be the most important question of…
Evaluate: Why Human Judgment Is Non-Negotiable
We have arrived at the phase of ADD where the most important human skill comes into play. You have written a specification. You have generated code using appropriate context and patterns. Now you must determine whether that code is actually correct. This is not a formality. AI-generated code can be syntactically correct, pass basic tests,…
Specification Templates: A Practical Library for AI Development
In the previous post, I made the case that specification is the highest-leverage skill in AI-driven development. A precise specification produces better output, requires less iteration, and surfaces ambiguity before it becomes a bug. But writing detailed specifications from scratch is cognitively demanding. You must simultaneously consider functional requirements, constraints, context, edge cases, and integration…
Code Is for Humans, Not Machines: Why AI Will Not Make Syntax Obsolete
With AI, “everybody is a programmer.” You do not need to learn syntax anymore. Just describe what you want, and the machine will write the code for you. If you have spent any meaningful time in this profession, you are probably laughing right now. Or at least shaking your head. This narrative has become extraordinarily…
The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
When I look back at the history of software, one pattern emerges with remarkable consistency: the promise to simplify software creation, to make it cheaper, and ultimately to eliminate the need for programmers altogether. This is not a new idea. It has been the driving ambition of our industry since the 1960s. And while each…
AI-Powered Fixed-Cost Development: A New Model for Agencies
Software development has always carried an uncomfortable truth: nobody really knows how long it will take. Clients want certainty. They want a number, a deadline, a budget they can plan around. Agencies and independent consultants want to deliver that certainty, but they have learned through painful experience that software estimation is more art than science….
The AI Orchestration Developer: Why Team Leaders Will Define the Next Era
There is a particular kind of developer who has spent years doing something that most of the industry undervalues: building people, not just systems. They review code not to gatekeep, but to teach. They pair with junior developers not because it’s efficient, but because they understand that growth compounds. They know that a team’s ceiling…
Why Ruby Might Be the Most AI-Friendly Language Nobody’s Talking About
A few weeks ago, Martin Alderson published something that caught my attention: a systematic comparison of how token-efficient different programming languages are when fed to large language models. The findings were fascinating. And if you’ve been following my writing on Ruby, you won’t be surprised to hear that Ruby came out looking very good indeed….
How AI Saved $2 Million in a Single Day; And It Wasn’t Vibe Coding
I recently came across a story that perfectly encapsulates something I’ve been thinking about for months. It’s about a CPO who was handed an unlimited token budget and told to vibe code three MVPs for Q1 2026. They did something unexpected instead. Rather than firing up Lovable or Bolt to start generating code, they opened…