That’s the punchline and the problem. I’ve run into these two similar scenarios which have had me stumped and annoyed. In one, I’m running Claude Code in both GoLand and PyCharm, trying to integrate one project’s API with another project’s GRPC service. In the other, I have a Scala library that needs updates, and then multiple services that depend on that library. The hiccup: each instance is completely unaware of the other’s existence. ...
One of the reasons I’m saddened that formal debate isn’t taught in schools anymore is that we’ve lost a key skill in not only communicating, but also in critical thinking and research. In debate, you’d often have to argue for the side that doesn’t match your own personal view. You’d be forced to research, refine your understanding, and in some cases actually change your opinion because you realized you were wrong. Because that’s the thing about an opinion, right? Despite what the internet and social media will have you believe, it’s not fact. It’s not the whole truth. It’s your perspective on something. ...
Trigger warning: This post contains opinions. Specifically mine. It also contains a confession or two, which I’m not thrilled about, but here we are. I don’t have many people in tech I actively look up to. The industry is drowning in loud, obnoxious voices who are very good at having opinions and very bad at having done anything. But Carmack is one of the rare exceptions. He’s always been the quiet, thoughtful one. The hacker in the original sense; someone who understands systems deeply enough to bend them, who ships because building is the point, not the clout. I’ve written before about my own struggle with that identity vs. the need to actually make money, that tension between doing the craft and doing the business. Carmack, for most of his career, has never had to compromise on that. He gets to just build. ...
Around a year ago I started one of my blog posts with this musing on “The Promise vs. Reality of AI in Tech”: I’m concerned about the industry’s direction with these [improvements in AI]. Instead of creating better developers, we’re often replacing them. Rather than building amazing accessibility tools, we’re creating deep fakes and virtual companions. Instead of developing better MVPs for real problems faster, we’re seeing low-quality products marketed as revolutionary simply because they were built without coding experience, for no purpose other than a quick cash-grab. ...
🚨 The guy who built Clawbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw just got hired by OpenAI. Let that sink in for a moment. This project is one of the biggest security nightmares of recent memory. Every day there are more stories of problems, exploits, vulnerabilities. Yet the project has gone viral in ways that few open source projects do, and people are eating it up. Meanwhile, I know developers who started similar projects and abandoned them specifically because of the security risks. They made the responsible choice. They understood the implications. They walked away. ...
We spend more effort learning how to prompt LLMs than we do communicating with other humans. People complain that AI is bad at understanding humans, but in truth, humans are rediscovering how bad we are at explaining ourselves. Prompting works because you’re forced to do interface discovery consciously. You test phrasing, observe outputs, refine assumptions. With humans, we think discovery is rude or inefficient, so we skip it. Then we’re shocked when the call fails. ...
⚠️ Generative AI isn’t lowering the barrier to entry. It’s lowering our standards. I hate that a talentless non-creative can use an AI music generator which, to most people sounds fine, but to others is clearly terrible, and make more money than my hard-working and super talented musician friends. I hate that someone with no experience can pick up an AI code generator and rip off someone else’s hard work solving a hard problem they struggled with over many years of trial and error, and then be successful because people don’t care it’s an obvious knockoff. ...
This came up in my feeds today. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until I can’t anymore: never before has there been a time where we needed to be more intentional about training and mentoring juniors than now. As much as I love and use it, my biggest worry with current AI tooling has always been that it takes the thinking and understanding away from you. This is different from previous coding tools. Many just obfuscated or abstracted concepts, others assisted with tedious tasks, but this time the tool does it all. And it’s making us lazy, and it’s making us less capable. Studies are starting to show this. ...
The words we choose matter. People have been calling me pedantic for a long time, but I’ve never seen the problem with that. Words have particular meanings. Even synonyms are just “similar”, not usually the same. Some time back I wrote a blog post about “Why You’re NOT an Engineer (also Why It [Probably] Doesn’t Matter)” The key point I made: there IS a difference between a coder, a programmer, a developer, and an engineer (although some people disagreed). ...
I’m really happy to see my LinkedIn feed finally catching up with what I’ve been saying for the last nine months: vibe coding sucks, and fundamentals are important. Also, before the haters go and hate, “all vibe coding is coding with AI, but not all coding with AI is vibe coding”. My dislike is and always has been with “the vibe”. I’ve been reading books like Masters of Doom and Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution lately, and looking back at those pioneers, they didn’t just have an intense love for what they did, they had a crazy deep fundamental knowledge of the things they worked with. And if they didn’t understand something? They took the time to figure it out. ...