A Million Lines of Markdown and No Code
I recently learned about a company that has rebuilt waterfall from scratch – on purpose, with AI – while believing they’re doing the most modern software development possible. The oldest failure in software process, the one we spent fifty years learning our way out of, wearing this year’s tooling. And the AI is executing it […]
Everybody Agrees You Should Hire Junior Engineers. Almost Nobody Does.
A colleague, Charles Penn, asked me recently what I thought the future looked like for junior engineers. He’s someone who always keeps the human element in view, and he’d been reading the same things I had. Juniors wondering out loud whether they’d be unhirable in a few years. Companies saying the quiet part out loud: […]
Faster Coding Means Slower Everything Else
At some point in the last year, my work changed: I was spending more time reviewing code than writing it. I can’t point to the moment it happened, there was no process change, no deliberate decision… I just looked back at the last year and noticed what had happened. Once I noticed it, I started […]
Custom AI vs. Off-the-Shelf: Stop Asking If, Start Asking Where
A client came to us with a clear vision: build a scheduling app for their staffing business, complete with a natural language interface so managers could describe scheduling constraints in plain English instead of wrestling with a GUI. They knew exactly what they needed custom AI for. They were wrong. Custom AI is software built […]
We’re Picking Tools for a Different Developer Now
A colleague of mine, Joe Coy, recently told me something that stuck with me. His team had chosen Maestro over Appium for mobile UI testing. The team’s reasoning made a lot of sense: Maestro was lightweight and easier to set up. By every traditional measure, it was the right call. Then they started using an […]
Treat Your AI Workflow Like You Treat Your Code
I kept having the same argument with Claude. Not a dramatic one. More like the low-grade friction of a coworker who keeps formatting the PR description wrong no matter how many times you fix it. The AI would reach for the wrong abstraction. I’d correct it. Next session, same mistake. I’d correct it again. And […]
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