Practical advice and proven patterns for writing maintainable, scalable code
I got promoted twice in three years, and the work didn’t change. Unreported work is invisible state: as far as the system is concerned, it is not running. Making your work visible isn’t marketing, it’s instrumentation — and it decays.
Your Work Has No TelemetryI used AI more last year than in any year of my career, and got quietly worse at my job. AI skill atrophy is quiet. You only notice when something breaks. The pendulum, and the three habits that keep it swinging.
The Pendulum: How to Use AI Without Losing Your EdgeI approved my own PR and felt nothing. Over-delegating to AI didn’t just make my work fragile — it made it boring. The fix wasn’t using less AI. It was flipping who leads.
Don’t Automate the FunIn 1982 skaters named a trick “the impossible” because the physics said it couldn’t exist. Decades later a 1000fps camera revealed why it can — and what that has to do with your job as a developer.
AI Didn’t Take Your Job – It Revealed ItI caught myself, again, telling Claude that we don’t do it that way in this codebase. Not the first time that week. Not the first time that day. Different repo,…
How many times have you told the agent the same thing this weekSpec-driven development promises control through living, iterative specifications. But without clear workflows and better tooling, teams keep falling into the same big-design-upfront trap that agile was invented to escape. A practitioner’s honest take on the gap between SDD’s vision and its current reality.
Spec-Driven Development Isn’t Waterfall — But It Keeps Ending Up ThereEvery clean code practice we follow was invented to solve a human problem. But what happens when humans are no longer the primary audience of source code? A senior developer’s honest reckoning with AI-driven development and what it means for the craft.
Clean Code Is Dead (And I Hate That I Agree)New research shows experienced developers are 19% slower with AI tools — but feel 20% faster. I walk through three major studies that prove AI isn’t making us faster, and share the confidence boundary framework for knowing what to delegate and what to keep.
I’ve been producing bad code (because of AI)Research shows AI makes experienced developers 19% slower, reduces code comprehension by 17%, and trust in AI output is declining. Yet the pressure to be dramatically more productive with AI keeps growing. Here is what the data actually says and how to find your confidence boundary.
The AI Productivity Lie Nobody Wants to AdmitWorking code without architecture predictably collapses. Learn why AI amplifies architectural chaos, how accidental architecture leads to rewrites, and what hexagonal architecture can do to fix it — with practical steps you can take this week.
Your Code Works. Your Architecture Doesn’t.
