Articles
March 2026
The Illusion of Building
There is still a big gap between making an app in the shape of something vs. making and operating a real software system
Humans and Agents in Software Engineering Loops
Moving from the 'how' loop to creating the harness for the 'how' and still playing the key role in the 'why' loop
February 2026
Spec-driven development doesn't work if you're too confused to write the spec
Specification-driven development is ineffective when developers lack sufficient clarity to articulate the specifications in the first place
Bring Back Ops Pride (xpost)
Operations engineering deserves respect as a critical discipline, and the industry should stop renaming ops roles to escape the stigmatized term
No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering
There is no single technology or management technique that can deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement in software productivity
Tool Shaped Objects
AI systems create the sensation of productive work rather than actual output, as the market for feeling productive is far larger than the market for being productive
End Game Play
Modern society skips the opening and middlegame phases of complex endeavors to rush toward predetermined endings, creating an illusion of progress while neglecting actual work
January 2026
The AI Ready Software Developer
A series of very rational and clear thinking about how LLMs can be helpful but are very limited
LLMs, Context Windows & Brown M&Ms
How LLMs fail the brown m&m test
AWS and Microsoft are selling much more than cloud services
An extremely important corporate value is never getting blamed
Being creative requires taking risks
People who are able to remain interesting design their lives to avoid [mode collapse] happening to them
Pluralistic: Code is a liability (not an asset)
Code is a liability and the cost is the work to maintain it
Slowing Down AI On Purpose
Use LLMs in small batches of code with the human still in the driver's seat
Agentic AI and The Mythical Agent-Month
Scaling agents up in parallel still hits mathematical limits and is limited by the common knowledge problem