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Here Be Monsters: What Do You Still Need to Know When Agents Do the Work?
Starting from a CI failure caused by Codex cramming whole React components onto single lines, Adrian Quiroga argues that as AI agents write code faster than anyone can read it, engineers still need three things: solid fundamentals, breadth across the stack, and the willingness to dive in for just-in-time depth when something breaks.
13 min · 2,875 words
Alex Gusev, CTO of Uploadcare, reflects on turning 40 and realizing that AI coding agents have removed the engineering challenges that drove a lifetime of side projects and startups, and on what it means to look for a new kind of challenge in a second professional life.
3 min · 804 words
Chemists, Chemical Engineers, and Plant Managers
Drawing on more than a decade at ThredUp, Ryan Moser proposes three work archetypes — chemists who discover, chemical engineers who build systems, and plant managers who run reliable operations — and explains how knowing yours guides a career, why talented people struggle in the wrong conditions, and how leaders can tell whether people outgrew the company or it outgrew them.
8 min · 1,900 words
What I learned from six months of being stupid on purpose
A recent finance graduate reflects on six months of deliberately putting themselves in situations where they knew the least, teaching themselves software from scratch, and how getting comfortable with feeling stupid led to faster learning and a startup incubator acceptance.
13 min · 2,965 words
How employment is changing at Anthropic
Anthropic economists study how AI has restructured work inside Anthropic: hiring shifted away from junior technical roles as AI agent hours grew to outnumber employees six to one by August, output per person rose as staff adopted new tools, and human attention became the bottleneck. The paper ends with lessons for other employers.
23 min · 5,401 words
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
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
Geoffrey Huntley argues that teams who cannot make time to experiment with AI agents and loop engineering are effectively preparing themselves to be replaced by those who do.
10 min · 2,250 words
a16z's Seema Amble, Ivan Makarov and David Borecky argue AI is reshaping the CFO role from accountant to banker to builder: data stops being the bottleneck, finance engineers build their own tools, teams get smaller, planning becomes continuous, controls become product features, and finance's mandate grows.
9 min · 2,003 words
Diomidis Spinellis argues that better performance, lower cost and higher availability mean AI will take over most cognitive work, and reflects on moving from making a living by thinking to making thinking part of a life worth living.
2 min · 534 words
Deepthi Sigireddi from Supabase
Phil Eaton interviews Deepthi Sigireddi, Head of Databases at Supabase and former Vitess project lead at PlanetScale, about 25 years of database scaling work, leading Vitess, sharding Postgres with Multigres, incidents she learned from, and what agents creating many tiny databases mean next.
6 min · 1,473 words
Looking back at more than 5 years at Shopify
Matt Burnett reflects on nearly five and a half years as an engineer at Shopify—the products he helped ship and then forgot, the people, and the odd disbelief of having ended up there—after leaving in August 2026.
8 min · 1,769 words
A sustainable web career, for when all this blows over
Front-end developer David Bushell gives career advice for web workers in a rough market: don't quit a paying job without a fallback, invest in skills in short supply such as accessibility, CSS in stylesheets and communication, and drop dead weight like React, GitHub dependence and influencer culture, because the web remains a human creation for human needs.
4 min · 937 words
David Heinemeier Hansson follows up his Rails World talk telling programmers to put down the pencils: coding agents are now good enough that writing most code by hand is no longer economically viable, AI is more like gaining capable new coworkers than another tool, and programmers who refuse to collaborate with agents are the ones who should worry.
2 min · 382 words
Software developers are not okay
Baldur Bjarnason looks at the wave of software developers posting about burnout, layoffs, the 2026 job market and AI taking the fun out of programming, and argues the comment sections reveal an industry in real distress. His essay explains why so many are not doing well and suggests people in software consider a possible future outside the tech industry proper.
10 min · 2,208 words
Do you actually like hard problems?
Sunil Pai argues that engineers who say they love hard problems mostly love puzzle solving and pattern matching, which AI now does with near-infinite breadth. The genuinely hard problems left mix engineering with product, society, culture and politics, and he reflects on missing being the go-to engineer for the grind even as people still seek his higher-level judgment.
1 min · 312 words
So You Think You Could Be An Electrician?
Contractor Jesse Smith pushes back on the viral “trades are an AI-proof six-figure escape hatch” narrative, weighing wages, injury risk, internal blue-collar status hierarchies, and how automation may still reshape construction work.
11 min · 2,474 words
Most of you don’t need "unlearning" you need like 1-2 years of financial runwayYour primary bottlenecks may be external, not internal.
Chris Lakin argues that many people seeking emotional "unlearning" are really constrained by external bottlenecks like money and stability, and that resolving those first often makes the supposed internal blocks disappear.
1 min · 202 words
[No] Use for Humans in the Age of AI
Alexander Schepanovski reads Anthropic’s 2030 AI-economy scenarios and asks what “use for humans” remains when knowledge work collapses—arguing power, scarcity, and who owns the robots matter more than productivity slogans.
8 min · 1,898 words