Engineering leaders say AI agents write code much faster, yet their release cycles are no faster than before. Typing was never the bottleneck: here’s where the time really goes, and what I’d change about review and verification.
Posts Tagged: software engineering
The opposite of AI slop: the agent that reads our production logs every night
While LinkedIn fights AI slop, an AI agent has quietly opened 42 merged fix PRs at Calendrz by reading production logs at 3 a.m. Here’s how it avoids producing slop of its own.
Bootstrapping All the Way Up: Build the System That Builds the System
The C compiler compiled itself. We have been bootstrapping for fifty years. AI just gave the loop a fast enough clock that building the system that builds the system finally compounds inside a single career.
Stop Building Systems. Build the System That Builds Them.
We have always measured engineering orgs by what they ship. That was a proxy. The real asset is the loop that produces it — and AI just changed its clock speed.
AI Engineering: Doing the Right Thing vs Doing the Thing Right — And Why It Matters
Peter Drucker coined the phrase “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right thing“. While this quote is about management vs leadership, it can be easily translated into engineering especially nowadays to separate 10X’ers from the rest. Remember when you spent three weeks refactoring that authentication system to use the “proper” design patterns, […]
AI-Generated Code and the Trust Factor
I’ve been invited recently to a roundtable discussion with other engineering leaders in Austin (big thanks to Jordan Kelly for organizing this!) where we discussed how is AI affecting the engineering teams — from the structure, to the way they operate, to morale and so on. One emerging theme throughout these conversations was the level […]
Next iteration of software engineers
As I shared previously, I don’t think AI is killing software engineering; it does however transform it. The rise of AI coding assistants—like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and others—has fundamentally changed how we build software. But more importantly, it’s changing who we are as engineers. We’re no longer just writing code. We’re shaping product—fast, and often […]
Experience or institutional knowledge?
These 2 things are often confused in our industry: experience and institutional knowledge. Too often I see companies evaluating engineers based on the fact they know where to go and make changes quickly and put out fires, rather than looking at the impact long term an individual has, on the platform, on its stability, on […]
Engineering Marketing
First of all please notice the title of this post: Engineering Marketing — and not Marketing Engineering! (I do work currently in Ads Engineering in Netflix, which deals as you would expect with Marketing Engineering, in other words engineering solutions to support our digital marketing efforts.) Point being that this post is about marketing engineering […]
Java, Map and Optional
I do like the Optional class in Java — it is a long awaited elegant replacement for returning null whenever something isn’t there then relying on if( x != null ) checks or using ?: in the format (x == null) ? “foo” : “bar”. It works great also with the new Java stream classes […]
