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AI Promised Less Work. I Have Never Worked More.
Orestis Ioannou, VP of Technology at Bold.org, charts his GitHub contributions since 2019 to show that coding agents made implementation cheap enough that he now runs far more work in parallel: he is back at his full-stack engineer pace, with bursts followed by burnout and a low season that is no longer low.
8 min · 1,727 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
On the Death of Amazon’s Writing Culture
Former Amazon principal engineer Steve Huynh argues that AI-generated six-pagers are hollowing out the writing culture that once forced clear thinking at Amazon, describes 'AI;DR' and teams that stopped writing entirely, and proposes keeping human writing and reading for one-way-door decisions.
8 min · 1,826 words
Developer Agency in the Age of AI
David Scott Bernstein argues that AI gives developers leverage but not agency: the real work is understanding problems, choosing tradeoffs, testing assumptions and preserving changeability, and teams must keep asking whether they can still understand, verify and change what they build.
5 min · 1,084 words
Younss argues that AI can raise individual task throughput without raising organizational throughput—like a hamster spinning faster without traveling—because queues, handoffs, and decision bottlenecks still dominate.
10 min · 2,310 words
Notes from AI and Software Engineering in 2026
A year after Claude Opus 4.5, Darragh O'Riordan reports how a four-engineer team now ships roughly 4x more change per month with LLM agents: what changed in workflow, review, testing and tooling, what still breaks, and how he keeps compute costs in check.
14 min · 3,243 words
The Problem is not the AI Code, but Nobody Knows Anything Anymore
Simon Späti argues the real risk of AI-written codebases is not mediocre generated code, but teams that lose architecture knowledge and intent because everyone just asks the model.
4 min · 836 words
A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
Sujith Jay Nair explains how platform staff engineers invent roadmap work by reading signals from systems, users, the organization, and the industry—when there is no PM or revenue line to follow.
8 min · 1,756 words
Claude Code creator Boris Cherny shares an internal note on product judgment under AI: gather information, act with urgency, and treat being wrong quickly as a feature of good leadership—not a failure.
2 min · 372 words
the senior engineer death spiralon proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
Sunil Pai names a common failure mode for engineers in new senior roles: cosplaying harder ambition, disappearing into secret overwork, burning out, then damaging trust. His antidote is to drop a level—become the greatest teammate first.
4 min · 993 words
Aleksandar Filipovski, 2026-09-16 See also: John Salvatier’s excellent blog, Reality has a surprising amount of detail I read a comment somewhere that stuck with me, that went something like this:
8 min · 1,784 words
Towards Self-Driving Codebases
Detail explores what it would take for AI agents to drive real software work end-to-end—beyond oneshot games and guarded migrations—while humans still steer most production engineering today.
9 min · 2,151 words
A systems engineer's rant about AI-agent hype, broken email, and how people without engineering background are shipping half-baked 'industry changing' ideas from agent-infested homelabs.
6 min · 1,447 words
You are the AI agent's harnessPreventing hallucinations upstream by treating the engineer as the harness.
A recently popular approach to AI-assisted coding is to build runtime harnesses around the model's output — review agents, verification loops, multi-pass pipelines that catch hallucinations after they happen.
14 min · 3,269 words
Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on management as catalysis—lowering activation energy for teams—rather than another fashionable org-chart experiment destined for the tech-blog receipts pile.
4 min · 913 words
The most important product decision is what you don't build
Liam Nugent on saying no to document hubs and notification centres in consumer fintech—and why the features you refuse often protect product clarity more than the ones you ship.
5 min · 1,079 words
Roadmap decisions rather than dates.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Will Larson uses a passkey rollout to argue for roadmaps centered on decisions and concrete tradeoffs. A working implementation can expose unresolved questions that dates and abstract commitments leave hidden.
1 min · 76 wordsagent-written
Middle management roles are also a trap.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
An examination of how middle management develops valuable coordination skills while leaving gaps in preparation for executive work. Will Larson discusses the limits of treating organizational advancement as a straightforward progression.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written
Generated and suppressed demand.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Team capacity can hide work people have stopped requesting, while improvements can generate new demand. Will Larson extends his model of struggling engineering teams to account for both effects in growing organizations.
1 min · 78 wordsagent-written
Make no assumptions.Original article link with an AI-written directory summary
Long-lived codebases accumulate layers of architectural assumptions as ownership changes. Will Larson considers how leaders can work effectively in complex domains without assuming that today's design reflects a single coherent plan.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written