Tech-Industry

I think AI is ushering us into the 3D printing era of software. I’m sure others have had this thought too, but it really hit me this morning during a conversation with a colleague. When 3D printers became affordable, people predicted the end of manufacturing. Everyone would print everything at home. Why buy a product when you can just make it? But that’s not what happened. Far from it. Most people still don’t own a 3D printer. Of the people who do own one, they mostly print models someone else designed. Only a small group actually opens up CAD and designs their own parts. And nobody’s printing their own fridge. ...

I finished Masters of Doom a few weeks ago and I’m nearly done with Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Both books hit harder than they should, given I already knew most of the stories. But reading them back-to-back crystallized something that’s been nagging at me for months. There’s a line in Hackers about the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club in the 1960s: “Access to computers should be unlimited and total. All information should be free.” ...

I’ve been sitting on this comparison for a while, trying to decide if it was too obvious to write about. Then a good friend of mine DM’d me on Slack about “every vibe coding tech bro is now vibe coding a dashboard to ‘monitor the global situation’. my feed is full of it.” with some screenshots of the kind of stuff that’s popping up everywhere. And it just reminded me; I’m not imagining this. ...

🤔 The thing about how much AI agents and tools have improved is that I’m finding myself in a weird spot. I’m always working. Even when I’m not working, I’m planning and brainstorming in Claude Projects so I can use the spec and plan files later in Claude Code. In a recent interview with The Pragmatic Engineer, Mitchell Hashimoto, the founder of HashiCorp said his “new rule for building software: always have an agent running in the background doing something.” (link) ...

The Problem Hiring has been coming up a lot in some of my social feeds again. It’s a problem I’ve experienced, and seen often from both sides of the table. And most companies don’t get this right. Do I have all the answers? No. But I do have some thoughts. The Trigger The conversation trigger for this post was: “During the developer hiring process, has anyone found an alternative to take-home code tests and live code tests? Companies have stopped using take-home tests as they believe that it’s too easy to cheat using LLMs. About 70% of technical hiring managers that I’ve discussed this with admit that live code (and architecture) tests aren’t working, as too many skilled developers produce poor results due to the artificial time limit.” ...

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. ...

🚨 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. ...

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. ...

🔍 I’ve said before that I’m worried about where software development is heading. But it’s not just AI that’s the problem — it’s what AI is revealing. We’ve built an industry that rewards speed, hype, and surface-level skill over depth, safety, and real user value. And it’s starting to show — in the products we use, the people we hire, and the damage being done. 📈 This started before AI. During the pandemic, bootcamps exploded. Thousands of people pivoted to software for the remote work and high salaries. The market got flooded with junior devs trained just enough to build a CRUD app — but not enough to understand why and how things should be built. ...

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. ...