The Subsidy and the Severance
AI's free-lunch phase is ending, and that makes AI-driven layoff math harder to defend. Two repricings, one ledger.
tag · 40 essays
#software-engineering
All essays tagged software-engineering.
The Agentic SDLC: Uniting the AI Tool Sprawl
Every tool in your product development life cycle is now an AI agent trying to do everything. Here is how to stop the chaos, draw the right boundaries, and build an orchestrated pipeline that actually works.
★Eleven Years, One Week, and an AI Co-Pilot: Rebuilding TravelTimes for iOS 26.4
A decade-old side project, six major features, one week. How spec-driven AI-assisted development compressed months of work into a focused sprint on a real codebase with real constraints — and where the AI got it wrong.
The Dark Factory Model for AI-Driven Software Development
Most engineers treat AI-generated code like work from a junior developer they don't trust. Simon Willison gave me a better mental model: the dark factory. Here is what it means, why experience is the raw material, and how to build a system that runs.
From Copy-Paste to Skill: What Thousands of AI Coding Sessions Taught Me About Guardrails
After thousands of sessions with Claude Code, Codex, Kiro, and every other LLM-based CLI and IDE, I distilled what I learned into a reusable Claude Skill. Here's how those lessons became the guardrails that let me move faster and actually trust the output.
Pipeline-First Is Not a DevOps Initiative - It's a Culture Shift.
Everyone sells pipeline-first delivery as a best practice. Remove access. Route through automation. Enforce consistency. What the slide deck leaves out is the part that actually determines whether this works.
★Meet Roci: My Always-On Personal AI Agent, One Month In
Back in January I wrote about OpenClaw as a concept. That post was the theory. This one is the implementation. One month running a dedicated EC2 instance, a name, and an agent I genuinely rely on.
Strip the Assumptions: What Enterprise AI Adoption Actually Is
Most enterprise conversations about GenAI are arguments about assumptions nobody has questioned. Here is what stays when you strip everything else away.
★They're Using Claude to Ship Claude (And It Shows)
Anthropic has shipped more meaningful product features in the last few weeks than most teams ship in a quarter. A theory — and what it tells us about what AI-assisted development actually unlocks when a team uses their own product to build it.
Yesterday's Feature Is Today's Bug
Every long-tenured engineering organization inherits decisions that made sense once and make everything harder now. On building IT strategy that outlasts the people who built it — without freezing the org in amber.
Dark Fiber, Bright Future: Why the AI Infrastructure Boom May Need Its Bust
The companies that built the modern internet went bankrupt doing it. The companies building AI infrastructure may follow the same path. That is not a warning. It is how transformative technology actually works.
From iOS to Android in a Weekend: How I Used Claude Code to Build a Complete App Without Writing a Single Line of Code
I took a production iOS app, pointed Claude Code at it, and had a fully functional Android app in eight hours over a weekend. Here's exactly how it worked.
From Caffeine Addict to App Builder: How I Vibe Coded a Pour-Over Coffee App in One Afternoon
My wife started making pour-over coffee. I started building her an app. What used to take weeks of Swift development now takes hours with AI-assisted coding. Here's the story of PourCraft, caffeine dependency, and the moment I realized the game has changed.
The Companies Spending the Most on AI Have the Most to Gain From Convincing You It Will Take Your Job
The AI-and-jobs conversation gets framed as either inevitability or competition. Both frames are incomplete — and both conveniently align with the interests of the companies selling the technology. A third reading of what's actually happening to work.
How I Built a Production Notification System for TravelTimes in One Day with Claude Code
From 'users want commute alerts' to 1,800 lines of shipped, App Store-ready code in a single coding session. A deep dive into architecture, edge cases, and what AI-assisted iOS development actually looks like.
OpenClaw and the Rise of the 'Real' AI Assistant
An honest look at OpenClaw, the open-source AI personal assistant generating real excitement. What it does, what I learned running it, and why it matters for the future of enterprise AI.
The Open Source Paradox AI Created
Generative AI is accelerating open-source adoption while quietly breaking the economic models that sustain it. This is not a tooling problem. It’s a policy and incentive failure.
Building StillView 3.0: Raising the Quality Bar with Claude Code and Opus 4.5
Using Claude Code and Opus 4.5 as thinking partners helped me rebuild confidence, clarity, and quality in a growing macOS codebase.
Getting Better at Getting Better in 2026
Real change compounds when you build systems that make improvement unavoidable.
The New Abstraction Layer: AI, Agents, and the Leverage Moving Up the Stack
Andrej Karpathy put words to something many engineers are quietly feeling: we have been handed a powerful alien tool with no manual. Where the leverage is actually moving up the software stack — and what that means for the people writing code right now.
The Year Ahead in AI, Enterprise Software, and the Future of Work
From generative AI as a tool to AI as a strategic partner. Reflections on 2025 and what excites me most about 2026.
Frontier Models, Small Language Models, and a New Middle Path
The most strategic AI decision is not which model to use — it is knowing when generic intelligence is not enough. AWS Nova Forge marks the shift from consuming AI to owning a specialized slice of it, and why that middle path is where enterprise AI actually lives.
My Journey to Trusting GenAI With More of My Code
How my workflow evolved from autocomplete magic to spec driven development, and why trusting GenAI with more of my code has changed how I build software.
When Winning Teams Lose: A Ferrari Leadership Lesson
Ferrari offers a masterclass in leadership anti-patterns. What their struggles reveal about accountability, culture, and building winning teams.
The Rise of MCP Servers: Why Every Developer Will Have a Personal AI Toolchain
From AWS to GitHub to Podman, MCP servers are quietly becoming the new plug-in ecosystem for developers—and it’s changing how we work.
From Procrastination to Privacy-First Productivity (Part 2)
After building two open-source task managers to battle procrastination, I took it further — secure cloud sync, end-to-end encryption, and now an MCP server that connects your tasks to AI.
The Art of Enough: Why Minimalism Matters in Software Engineering
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. Exploring Wirth's Law and why real progress might not be about adding more, but mastering the art of enough.
When Winning Feels Like Losing: Leadership Lessons from McLaren’s F1 Drama
Even championship teams can lose the narrative when leadership loses clarity. McLaren’s latest Formula 1 victory is proof that success without alignment can still feel like failure.
Beyond the Hype: Why GenAI Adoption in Development Isn't the Silver Bullet We Expected
The resistance to GenAI tools isn't simply about developers being stubborn or afraid of change—it's a rational response to tools that haven't yet proven their value universally, in an environment where people are already managing substantial change fatigue, and where the quality bar for production code remains high.
Coaching Your LLM with Software Craftsmanship Principles
By coaching LLMs with timeless software design principles like SOLID, DRY, and YAGNI, you can transform raw code generation into consistently clean, maintainable, and production-ready software.
From AI to Agents: Building Smarter Systems that think, decide and act
Exploring the evolution from AI to AI Agents with a hands-on FinOps example. Learn how AWS Strands enables autonomous agents to monitor cloud spend, notify on overages, and free humans to focus on higher-judgment work.
My AI Subscription Problem (or is it obsession)
A humorous confession about subscribing to nine different AI development tools in my quest to find the best tool(s).
What worked in 2010 is our blueprint for the AI-infused future
Just like Cloud before, today's AI transformation demands companies rebuild their operating models, leadership structures, and developer experience instead of retrofitting AI onto existing workflows.
The Future of Interfaces
AI-powered interfaces are evolving beyond traditional graphical UIs toward intent-based interactions, where users describe desired outcomes rather than navigating through menus and clicks.
September Read List
Four September reads all emphasize intentional leadership through simplicity and focus over busyness.
We are standing at the edge of another tech revolution
AI represents the third major tech revolution (after the internet and mobile), and like previous waves of creative destruction, it will eliminate some jobs while creating entirely new careers and opportunities for those who adapt quickly.
10 Years Later: A Journey of Continuous Learning Through Side Projects
Reflecting on a decade of staying hands-on in tech, fueled by curiosity, side projects, and a desire to never stop learning.
From Vibe Mode to Spec Mode: Why I’m All In on Kiro
A hands-on look at how AWS Kiro transforms AI-assisted development from chaotic vibes into structured, spec-driven engineering.
Back to Blogging: Two Decades in the Making
After two decades, I’m returning to blogging — back to sharing ideas, experiments, and the joy of connecting with curious minds.
I just ran a 20-billion-parameter LLM entirely offline, from my Mac at home
Successfully running OpenAI's 20-billion-parameter open-weight model (gpt-oss-20b) locally on a Mac M4 Pro, highlighting the potential of offline AI that rivals cloud-based models without internet dependency or costs.