Notes

Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.

Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it. The act of thinking through a problem, designing a solution, and expressing it precisely in a language that makes a machine do exactly what you intended. That is what drew most of us to this profession. It is a creative act, a form of craftsmanship, and for many engineers, the most satisfying part of their day.

This times 1,000. In a team setting, code review is always part of the job, but something gets lost when thatS all your job becomes.

One engineer captured this shift perfectly in a widely shared essay, describing how AI transformed the engineering role from builder to reviewer. Every day felt like being a judge on an assembly line that never stops. You just keep stamping those pull requests. The production volume went up. The sense of craftsmanship went down.

This is not a minor adjustment. It is a fundamental shift in professional identity. Engineers who built their careers around deep technical skill are being asked to redefine what they do and who they are, essentially overnight, without any transition period, training, or acknowledgment that something significant was lost in the process.

Having led engineering teams for over two decades, I have seen technology shifts before. New frameworks, new languages, new methodologies. Engineers adapt. They always have. But this is different because it is not asking engineers to learn a new way of doing what they do. It is asking them to stop doing the thing that made them engineers in the first place and become something else entirely.

I want to create things, I want to build features and fix bugs. I want to see the code as my canvas. The code over my life has included multiple languages, the tooling has changed, but the general concepts haven't. Now all of a sudden, the primary job that I've done is being offloaded to an LLM. Time will tell what the final result becomes.

There is an irony at the center of the AI-assisted engineering workflow that nobody wants to talk about: reviewing AI-generated code is often harder than writing the code yourself.

When you write code, you carry the context of every decision in your head. You know why you chose this data structure, why you handled this edge case, why you structured the module this way. The code is an expression of your thinking, and reviewing it later is straightforward because the reasoning is already stored in your memory.

When AI writes code, you inherit the output without the reasoning. You see the code, but you do not see the decisions. You do not know what tradeoffs were made, what assumptions were baked in, what edge cases were considered or ignored. You are reviewing someone else’s work, except that someone is not a colleague you can ask questions. It is a statistical model that produces plausible-looking code without any understanding of your system’s specific constraints.

Again, this will only add cognitive debt to your application. Tech debt you at least often have the knowlege of why you built things the way you did. When no one wrote the code, you lose that knowledge and the "why".

First, do not abandon your fundamentals. The pressure to become an “AI-first” engineer is real, but the engineers who will be most valuable in five years are the ones who deeply understand the systems they work on. AI is a tool. Understanding architecture, debugging complex systems, reasoning about performance and security: these skills are not becoming less important. They are becoming more important because someone needs to be the adult in the room when AI-generated code breaks in production at 2 AM.

Romantic heartbreak has an elaborate infrastructure. There are films for it. Songs for it. Poetry, rituals, sympathy, advice columns, entire industries dedicated to helping people metabolise romantic loss.

Friendship grief, however, remains oddly invisible. Nobody teaches you how painful it feels to slowly lose access to someone who once knew your inner life intimately. Someone who understood the silences before your sentences. Someone who could identify your mood from the way you said ‘okay’. Someone who knew everything about your crushes and petty insecurities.

And unlike romance, friendships don’t end dramatically. No final conversation. No clean rupture. No cinematic closure. Most friendships dissolve through unattended accumulation – postponed calls, exhausting jobs, geographic distance, emotional fatigue, different sleep schedules, different priorities, and different lives unfolding at different speeds. One day you realise the person who once knew your thoughts now only knows what you accidentally reveal on Instagram stories.

And because ‘nothing happened’, we often deny ourselves the right to grieve it.

I feel this. In college and then after, I had a core group of friends. We would hang out many weekends, we'd take vacations together, we were in each others' weddings. Then we got older, life happened, and drifted apart. I should reach out to them.

To bypass the issue of grid demand, many data center builders have promised to power the buildings themselves. The problem with that plan is that it’s easy to build a warehouse full of GPUs. Building power plants and transmission lines to power those warehouses will take years and cost billions more than the data centers. A skilled and efficient builder can complete a data center construction in under a year. Building new energy generation to meet that data center's power needs could take a decade.

When it comes to building new power plants and building out the grid, nothing is ever as fast and easy as one would expect it to be.

Most of these turbines are across state lines in Mississippi, are operating without public permits and are destroying the air quality of people who live near them. Some of the gas turbines weren’t disclosed. A lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center told Reuters the turbines are a violation of the Clean Air Act. It may not matter. On July 27, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency announced that power plants that exclusively keep data centers online won’t be subject to the Clean Air Act.

Much like everything else this administration has done, destroy the planet to further enrich the rich and powerful.

At the heart of this and as I mull this over again and again is the idea that the requirement to earn a profit leads to behavior that's directly counter to the open ideals upon which the web was founded. Removing that requirement allows for more openness (though that is still voluntary). If you believe in the open web, you'll make things open. If you support the ideal, you'll build for it. If all you see is a platform and a medium absent the ideal, you'll exploit it.

It's the ongoing debate about capitalism versus community. Too often the lust for more and more profit ruins good things.

In the case of software, the industrialisation of production is giving rise to a new class of software artefact, which we might term disposable software: software created with no durable expectation of ownership, maintenance, or long-term understanding.

I can see where spinning up a quick prototype might be a good use of vibe coding. Maybe even a little personal-use app could as well. But I would hate to see well built, and well designed applications become shells of their former selves.

The open question, then, is not whether industrial software will dominate, but what that dominance does to the surrounding ecosystem. Previous industrial revolutions externalised their costs onto environments that seemed infinite until they weren't. Software ecosystems are no different: dependency chains, maintenance burdens, security surfaces that compound as output scales. Technical debt is the pollution of the digital world, invisible until it chokes the systems that depend on it. In an era of mass automation, we may find that the hardest problem is not production, but stewardship. Who maintains the software that no one owns?

The main winners in a gold rush are the ones selling pickaxes, and it sure seems to me like the token vendors are about the only ones who really stand to gain from most of this, if we’re adhering to any coherent, holistic definition of productivity.

I wonder how much of the supposed productivity gains are either eaten up by reviewing the pull requests, or later, fixing the tech debt and bugs caused by the code generators. But if the AI companies can convince your boss they can get more work out of you, whelp, there's the ball game.

In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text.

This just makes me sad. I know it's nothing new, but seeing books destroyed to create new AI slop is just painful to see.

When everyone fakes an opinion to look engaged, you end up with a five-way debate over something that should’ve been a coin flip. Real opinions get drowned out by performative ones. “I don’t care, just pick one” is permission for the room to move on

There's not always a single correct way to build things. Choose one and go with it. You will likely be able to change it later if the need arises.

Some things deserve your conviction. A lot of things don’t. Knowing the difference is the skill.

That's the key part, there are some thoughts and decisions that are more important. Focus your efforts there.

In Texas just this Tuesday, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three who lived in the US for 35 years building houses and caring for his family. The agency immediately released a statement justifying lethal force on someone it alleges tried to “weaponize his vehicle.” Videos showing parts of the confrontation already suggest it’s probably another bullshit story like the ones we’ve seen from Minnesota. The feds later admitted they were looking for an entirely different person. Salgado Araujo nonetheless ended up dead.

ICE will never tell the truth about what they do. They don't want accountability. The media and everyone needs to realize this before they start printing and believing more ICE bullshit.

The government is very upset that people are criticizing it for shooting innocent mothers to death in the street. DHS stalked and intimidated a man who protested against state-sponsored killing, issuing him a “WARNING NOTICE” as flimsy as the nonjudicial “warrants” it uses now to bust into people’s homes. It’s like if Jay and Silent Bob showed up at your house because of an online comment you wrote, except with guns and the force of the federal government. It’s both deadly serious and deeply unserious. What are they afraid of? Well, we already know. Accountability in any form.

I guess the First Amendment doesn't matter if you hurt their feelings.

Policing in America has always been complicated, but the Trump administration has made it a runaway train of abuse fueled by billions of dollars and unapologetic racial animus. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has gotten so much money and permission from Trump that it operates its dear leader’s fundamentally racist mission of mass deportation with impunity. ICE agents have kidnapped people, knocked down doors without warrants, assaulted reporters, terrorized the general public (including children and infants), and even shot dead innocent people in broad daylight. And that’s just the brief summary of events.

ICE is a menace to democracy and its murderous conduct should be soberly considered. But we should also recognize that these people are weak and sad and ought to be made fun of. Even for their stupid outfits, which look ripped from a “how to be tacticool” buying guide. And Americans are ridiculing these people. What better way to protest an army of clowns than by showing up as Portland did with a human frog at the front? Cops arrested that frog. Trillions of dollars later, we’ve learned nothing about counter-insurgency, because now there’s a frog legion.

These ICE agents are so small that they wear masks in public like a bunch of cowardly Patriot Front wannabes, who probably got a similar amount of training. You’d think the average DMV worker would have been masked up for years based on the abuse they get, but then again, the average government employee is far braver than these fools.

I don’t miss floppy disks. I miss the mindset they demanded—that every byte matters, that constraints breed creativity, and that software should be light on its footprint.

I remember booting up the Amiga computer as a kid using floppy disks. All the games I played on it used 3.5-inch floppy disks and I don't remember any of them needing more than 1 disk.

Anthropic ran a randomized trial in early 2026 where engineers learned a new Python library, half with AI assistance and half without. Both groups finished the tasks at the same speed. But the AI group bombed the follow-up comprehension quiz: 50% versus 67% for the manual group, with the gap widening on debugging. The interesting cut was inside the AI group itself. Engineers who used AI to ask conceptual questions scored above 65%. Engineers who copy-pasted the generated code scored under 40%.

During a televised cabinet meeting at the White House in 2025, Musk, wearing a murdered-out MAGA hat signed by his boss, had a giggle about “accidentally” canceling Ebola prevention. He said it was a mistake that would be fixed. USAID whistleblower Nicholas Enrich, testifying before Congress, said that fix never came. A little more than a year after Musk’s comments, Africa is facing what could become the worst Ebola outbreak ever.

Cause and effect seems to be a concept that is so often lost.

You might think Musk’s actions gutting effective global health programs clash with his downright creepy quest to raise birth rates, but not when you consider the guy is also a huge racist. The list is too long to keep score, but a few relevant highlights: He’s stoked claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa, spent most of January posting other white supremacist talking points, and most recently has been encouraging race riots in the UK all to gin up anti-immigrant sentiments. Is there any doubt about why this guy had so much fun destroying one of the most successful global health initiatives in history, which saved millions of Black people?

Musk and the current administration aren't even trying to hide their racism anymore.

Musk hijacked the government to destroy these missions and dehumanize these people in service of the total lie that it would make the government more efficient. Of course, there’s a big difference between “efficiency” and incompetence. An agency isn’t more efficient if it doesn’t exist; it’s simply been murdered. A fire department with no firefighters looks good on a balance sheet if you can ignore that the city is ablaze.