Essays on AI, engineering and Rails
Honest takes on code, AI, and what actually works
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Latest ·
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5–7 minutesThe Rise of Wasteful Resources
Read essay →: The Rise of Wasteful ResourcesWe used to be proud of making things small. Now the default is to throw more tokens, more context and more compute at every problem. Why AI waste became normal, what it really costs, and how to get the craft…
Recent essays
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The Middle Loop Is Where Engineering Actually Lives Now
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…
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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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