Engineering manager, Kotlin enthusiast, speaker, and dad. Writing about tech, work, and life.
Worth a reminder: everyone you work with is going through something outside of work. They might be dealing with tricky relationships (kids, parents, partner, friends), health concerns, financial pressures, emotional distress or grief, or like a hundred other possible stressors. A little grace and humility can go a long way in helping your coworkers have an OK day at work, and as a result make things a little better for them at home. 💙
Trust me, when someone signs up for your service, nobody wants 50 emails in the first week explaining all the amazing things it does. Like one email every couple weeks, fine, but blasting people every day of the week with your app is just annoying. If your product works well and does what it says, I assure you we’ll come back and use it.
Please never change Dropbox, you’re still BY FAR the best at file sync and file management. Every other service (iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive) is either bad at the actual job of syncing or is littered with a bunch of cruft nobody wants or asked for. Doing one thing well is so underrated. 🏆🔄
It’s well known that multitasking is a myth and that constantly jumping around wastes more time than it saves, but now we’re supposed to “orchestrate” like 17 different agents at once and expect amazing outcomes? Sure.
When I block an AI hype bro on LinkedIn (“I’ll teach you how to 10x your engineers with AI!”) it says they won’t notify the person that I blocked them. But really I want the opposite – give me an option to definitely let them know I blocked their dumb posts from my timeline forever.
Good one by Nathaniel Fishel on hype bros locking in on AI vanity metrics:
The winners will be the ones with the discipline to measure what matters: Does the user’s life get better, or did we just make our repo bigger?
It must be so annoying to be on the other end of a partner who’s stuck in the AI hype bubble. That dude who finishes a day of work and then all weekend drones on and on about AI to their families about how it’s changing the world and how they should be using it for everything. Must be insufferable.
Say it with me for the people in the back (aka, those stuck in the AI slop hype bubble): WRITING CODE HAS NEVER BEEN THE BOTTLENECK.
It’s such an odd but kinda fun feeling to be the old, grizzled, experienced dude in the room. By virtue of sheer volume and having seen some truly brain-meltingly-stupid stuff, seems like the best thing I can do is to share my lived experiences and perspectives so we can hopefully avoid making the same mistakes for the 10th time (see terrible tech bros doing terrible tech bro stuff).
So when you see me going on and on about some specific theme (layoffs, AI slop, hype bubbles of late), it’s very likely a flashback to a story line that ends badly that I’ve seen before and we probably want to avoid doing again.
Transitioning from being the young, rage-filled, justice-seeking guy to the old, rage-filled, justice-seeking guy really creeps up on you!
It’s like, cool to listen to Weezer again?! Yes, I’ve been here for 30 years. =w= 🤓🤘
I’m not a doomsdayer but there’s something very cool about someone taking the time to package up terabytes of human knowledge in case an internet disabled apocalypse hits, and wrap it up nicely in an open source app. Love weird projects like this.
This entire post about when and how to slow down in the age of AI by James Stanier is full of great stuff, including this:
If the decisions that precede execution are flawed, AI will faithfully implement those flaws in a way that looks like fully featured code. Looks can often be deceiving, especially with powerful and confident models. It will generate thousands of lines of code based on a misunderstood requirement. It will happily build an elegant solution to the wrong problem.
The illusion of speed is that you’re making progress when you’re actually digging yourself into a deeper hole.
The answer isn’t to abandon speed, but to deploy it deliberately. We should only unleash AI’s pace when we’re confident it’s pointed in the right direction.
And this:
Given that AI is speeding things up so much, if you haven’t already been challenged on why something’s taking so long, you certainly will be soon.
“Can’t you just use AI?” is a new form of velocity pressure, and it’s particularly insidious because it conflates the appearance of productivity with actual throughput. Yes, AI can generate code in seconds. But generating code and solving the right problem are not the same thing.
An astute observation from M.G. Siegler on AI’s notable lack of taste, especially with something as complex as personal travel preferences:
From here we quickly enter a maze of a hundred little preferences that are altered by thousands of real-world variables. If the powers that be thought the game of Go was a good, complex task to prove out AI, wait until it gets a load of trying to book travel for a family with children.
For all these stories about AI creating 500,000 lines of code and 90% of an app in 10 minutes, where are the follow up posts about the meaningful, measurable outcomes it created?
Like what actual business problem was solved? How well did it integrate with your existing product and strategy? How many new paying customers did you land because of it? What profit did it generate? What was the customer support experience for it like? Did customers actually like it? Did customers actually use it? How did it materially impact your business or revenue? How maintainable was the code base over time? 🦗
This is the tech bro bullshit worldview we’re up against. Unreal.
Was using Claude Code and it got confused as to when to use curly quotes in code (eg, literally never) and it broke a bunch of stuff. Maybe the AI hype bros can chill a bit with the “I BUILT THIS APP IN 15 MINUTES TO 90% DONE” stories?
I know it’s not serious but I’m still proud of my 0%.
Some of the smartest, most thoughtful people I know in tech are extremely skeptical of AI. That is, as they say in our business, a smell.
These aren’t the loud, bombastic, attention seeking jerks you see everywhere on socials. They’re just good folks who have proven time and time again to have strong ethics, thoughtful judgement, deep expertise, a strong sense of community, and a kindness toward humans. I’ve seen them build up open source communities and people alike.
So when the people you respect the most are deeply skeptical of something, that’s worth sitting with. Especially when the subject matter is something that has a non-zero chance of imploding.
We literally can’t go a week without a mass layoff, this time by Epic. I’m getting real fucking tired of asking old colleagues and friends “Hey, saw the news about the layoffs, you OK?”
At the risk of sounding corny, as a grizzled (but experienced) old dude, I can tell you with great confidence that your values – what you believe way down deep – is the best thing to help you navigate your career choices. Over the long run it’s what’ll make you successful.
Definitions of success may vary wildly and it’s easier said than done, but if you can consistently align your values with your work, you’re already mostly there.
There are people in 2026 talking about how many lines of code they shipped with a straight face. Well, I think they’re people at least. 😑
Just read an AI hype post saying their vibe coding got them 90% complete on a project. Woo hoo! The “only” things they had to engage an engineer to finish off: authentication, API keys lockdown, VPN protection, and a full security audit.
Funny how all these over the top “AI is changing everything!” posts are largely from people running AI startups. Totally not suspicious at all and very believable.