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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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned in tech is boundaries. When to set them, how to enforce them, and (occasionally) when to cross them. Learning this early in my career made it easier to apply later – like now, running my own business. If I don’t get paid when I don’t work, then I don’t work when I don’t get paid. Simple. But this isn’t just on my mind because I’m chasing overdue invoices (though, you know, that too). It started when I saw posts and articles about how 996 culture is gaining traction among startups and founders, especially in Silicon Valley. You know, the “work 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week” grind. And this is despite most people knowing it’s unhealthy. Despite the constant complaints on social about burnout and not having a life outside work. ...

Don’t trust the salesperson. Trust the user reviews. When billionaires share their “secrets to success,” they’re selling to people who’ll never have their starting advantages. When AI executives tell everyone to “learn to code,” they’re ignoring billions without basic internet access. When tech companies promise their products will make us smarter, research often suggests the opposite may be true. Yes, innovation matters. Ford’s customers might have asked for faster horses instead of cars. But here’s the difference: when someone’s paycheck depends entirely on selling you something, when their company’s survival hinges on that sale, they’re not solving your problem, they’re solving theirs. ...

In some of my previous posts I’ve talked about playing around with “vibe coding” tools, more specifically the more hands-on ones like Cursor and Windsurf where I can still jump in if needed. Every time I have an idea for a silly or stupid app just for myself, I tend to gravitate towards these tools, not because I can’t be arsed to do it myself, but because I’m genuinely curious about how well these perform and how much they improve over time. ...

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect It describes how someone reads an article in their area of expertise, finds it full of errors and oversimplifications, but then turns the page and takes the next article, on a subject they know nothing about, at face value. I only learned this term recently, although I’ve always kinda knew and understood the concept. And with all the content LinkedIn and YouTube have been force feeding me, I’ve been thinking about how this idea extends beyond just “reading the news” to our skills and expertise. ...