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 before agents started producing code faster than any human could…
Category: AI development
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 have hired, fired, onboarded, mentored, and occasionally been forced to explain to finance why a “Senior Applied Generative AI Engineer II” and a…
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. Juniors are saved. Pick a side. The reality is messier. Big Tech new grad hires dropped to 7% of all new hires, down…
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 thing being “solved.” They are probably wrong. Not because AI is bad, but because “almost solved” is the most dangerous phase in any engineering problem.
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 to verification. The complexity never disappeared. It accumulated at the new boundary. And the new boundary is arguably harder than the old one.
The First 1,000 Lines Determine the Next 100,000 in AI Coding
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 them. And unlike a junior developer who…
How to Make Your Website Agent-Ready With WebMCP: A Practical Guide
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 practical companion. No philosophy. No speculation about…
Coding Is Changing. Software Engineering Is Not Going Anywhere.
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 software engineers currently do within six to twelve months. He pointed…
The “Build It Yourself” Trap: How AI Enthusiasm Is Quietly Killing Core Product Development
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 powerful enough to help you build it yourself? The reasoning sounds compelling on the surface….
No, Average People Will Not Build Their Own Software With AI
There is a narrative gaining traction in tech circles, on social media, and in breathless conference keynotes that goes something like this: AI will soon let anyone build their own software. Need a budgeting app? Just describe it to an AI and it will create one for you. Want a custom CRM for your small…