Essays on AI, engineering and Rails
Honest takes on code, AI, and what actually works
-
Latest ·
·
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
-
The Unstructured AI Problem: Why Most Teams Are Using AI Wrong
Every developer I know uses AI tools now. Copilot suggestions appear mid-keystroke. ChatGPT tabs stay permanently open. Claude conversations stretch across multiple projects. The adoption curve was vertical, faster than any technology…
-
ADD: AI-Driven Development as a Methodology for the Future Engineer
Software development has always evolved through methodologies that structure how we think about building systems. Waterfall gave way to Agile. Test-Driven Development changed how we approach correctness. Behavior-Driven Development shifted focus toward…
-
The Future Engineer: What Software Development Looks Like When AI Handles the Code
The software industry has entered a period of genuine transformation. After decades of incremental tooling improvements, AI-assisted development is introducing changes that feel qualitatively different from what came before. Code completion, automated…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
Work with me
AI-driven development, Rails and engineering leadership. See what I do and how we can work together.