Essays on AI, engineering and Rails
Honest takes on code, AI, and what actually works
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Latest ·
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6–10 minutesI Still Miss Writing Code
Read essay →: I Still Miss Writing CodeThere is a specific kind of quiet I have been thinking about lately. It is late. The office is empty, or the house is finally asleep. There is a problem on the screen that refuses to be solved, and for…
Recent essays
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The Editor Wars Are Over. The Reading Wars Started.
Last Tuesday I opened Neovim at nine and closed it after one. Four hours. I pressed i twice. The rest was j, k, Ctrl-d, /, gd, Ctrl-o, and a lot of sitting…
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Do You Still Read Books?
A developer asked me that on a call in June. Not sarcastically. He asked it the way you would ask someone who still develops film. I had mentioned I picked up the…
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AI Won’t Turn Non-Builders Into Builders
Someone showed me their AI-built SaaS last week. Looked clean. Demo worked. They asked me if they could quit their job. I asked what happens when a user signs up tomorrow and…
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The Gatekeeper Generation
A developer at a fintech client lost three days to a reconciliation job that was silently dropping records under load. He had shipped eleven features in four months. Real output, not demo…
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Fable 5 Is Back. The AI Coding Market Already Moved On.
On June 12, the US government told Anthropic to pull Claude Fable 5. Three days after it launched. The order said no foreign nationals could touch it, including Anthropic’s own foreign employees,…
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The New Burnout Comes From Watching, Not Building
A developer with 20 years on the job told me something last week. His old burnout used to make sense. Eight hours of code. Brain fried. Go home. Sleep. Repeat. Predictable. His…
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Is AI Quietly Contracting the World Economy?
Is AI Quietly Contracting the World Economy? A Quebec translator I read about made roughly six figures in 2023. By late 2025 her work requests had dried up. Total earnings for the…
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Rails + RubyLLM vs LangChain in 2026: The Honest CTO Comparison
The Email That Started This Post A friend who is a founder sent me a Telegram message last month. “We’re three engineers. We have an AI feature to ship by Q3. Everyone…
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The Middle Loop Is Where Engineering Actually Lives Now
Someone finally named the thing. There’s a word now for the work I’ve been doing for the last two years without a vocabulary for it. The middle loop. Supervisory engineering. The thing…
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