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Ryan Bigg reflects on applying to hundreds of tech roles after years in the industry, the mismatch between experience and current hiring, and deciding to look beyond tech for what’s next.
1 min · 270 words
Were software engineers blue-collar workers all along?
Peter Bryant argues that much of software engineering has always looked more like skilled trades work than the white-collar myth—and that AI is making that continuity clearer, not inventing a new class of work.
2 min · 531 words
Tobias van Schneider argues that AI-era small teams can finally build specialized software for "unsexy" physical industries long ignored by top engineering talent locked into ads and social products—and that switching costs for legacy enterprise software are starting to fall.
2 min · 448 words
Gentoo developer Michał Górny asks Python package maintainers not to adopt uv-build as their build backend, arguing that its size and Rust toolchain requirement break builds on less common architectures and downstream distributions, while its benefits over backends like flit-core or hatchling are minimal.
3 min · 579 words
Can Ease of Creation Lead to Decrease in Quality & Value?
Gustavo Pezzi of Pikuma reflects on whether AI tools that make software and games trivially easy to produce will flood the market with cheap, generic work, drawing parallels with past shifts in other crafts and asking what will make people care about what you make.
11 min · 2,431 words
Where is all the new, good software?
Nate Meyvis lists candidate answers to the skeptic’s question—if AI coding is so powerful, why isn’t more great new software obvious—covering quieter quality gains, limited adoption, political bottlenecks, ephemeral and private tools, leisure capture, and AI sometimes reducing software use.
2 min · 511 words
Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later
Taylor Troesh revisits AI-related excerpts from Kevin Kelly's 2016 book The Inevitable a decade on, noting that Kelly anticipated a few AI heavyweights dominating while also arguing for a future of open, ubiquitous, commodity intelligence.
5 min · 1,089 words
Living in the Weimar era of Ruby
Julik Tarkhanov responds to DHH's RailsWorld vibe-coding keynote, arguing that celebrity disinterest in Rails does not obligate the community to abandon it, and framing a freer, post-celebrity chapter for Ruby.
13 min · 2,998 words
Just say no to OpenAI and Anthropic
Security engineer Micah Lee argues against paying OpenAI and Anthropic, citing the frontier labs' AGI ideology, and explains why open-weight models (e.g. GLM) are now good enough for complex work, with private inference options like Tinfoil and cheap ones like OpenCode Go.
7 min · 1,529 words
I admire John Gruber. I think he’s a great writer. I think he’s smart as hell. He’s annoyingly funny, too. I am impressed and inspired by his success with both Daring Fireball and The Talk Show. I get excited when John links to one of my apps or articles. When he linked to my story about relaunch...
4 min · 1,005 words
Ray Myers argues mathematicians are not Luddites: AI-assisted math, built on tools like the Lean prover and the Lean FRO, had natural synergy that researchers embraced, but in his view OpenAI's hype and conduct broke the community's trust. He walks through a timeline from 2014 to October 2026 and draws parallels to how AI companies treat software engineers.
20 min · 4,573 words
Cendyne recounts being the last engineer at a company that bet on marketed LLM intelligence to replace engineering headcount, reflecting on confidence theater, M&A incentives, and what "Fable/Mythos tier" AI meant for the job.
4 min · 912 words
Rich Whitehouse argues that "artificial intelligence" is a poor label for frontier generative models, criticizes large language models and the companies building them on grounds including copyright, labor and societal harm, and urges readers to stay aware of what they are participating in.
14 min · 3,304 words
Please Stop the Slop: What AI Slop Is and How to Spot It
Tejas Kumar defines AI slop—cheap machine-generated content with no human value—after it showed up in the comments under his own post, explains how to spot it, cites the research behind its spread, and argues being human still wins, closing with a petition.
16 min · 3,572 words
What I've been seeing lately (in software)
A personal survey of software culture amid generative AI: normalizing pro-human discussion, exacting design and organizing, the job question, beautiful work, and a growing European push toward self-hosted and public-sector open source.
4 min · 848 words
Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones
Shokunin Studio tracks the dozen-plus AI 'vibe coded' clones of Photoshop and other Adobe, Microsoft, Avid and Autodesk apps, compares them to earlier waves of automated cloning, and argues vibe-cloned piracy undermines the incentive to build original creative software.
7 min · 1,496 words
The reverts will continue until morale improves
PostgreSQL committer Peter Eisentraut reflects on the unusually large wave of feature reverts after PostgreSQL 19 entered beta, why quality bar and unfinished design led to cutting ~8–10 significant features, and what that means for PostgreSQL 19 and 20.
5 min · 1,145 words
Fernando Borretti argues that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained inside a community of other humans, and that AI is dissolving those communities in software engineering and beyond, making private intellectual work, from reading papers to writing essays and open source, feel superfluous.
6 min · 1,414 words
You Might Want to Try Being Less Creative
After a jam session at Secret Studios with a musician friend, Bryant reflects on why he never finished a song as a teenager, arguing that trying to be original at every step keeps you from finishing anything and that borrowing proven structures frees you to create.
3 min · 732 words
Why Are Coding Agents So Dumb?
Michael Lynch argues that while LLMs keep getting better, the coding agents that drive them have barely improved since early 2025: he separates the model from the agent, catalogs the workflow gaps and bugs he still hits in Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cline and Pi, and sketches what a better agent would do.
10 min · 2,316 words