Swizec Teller

I've been a dad for 3 months now so obviously I have it all figured out and there's nothing new to learn.

The points are fake and the score is made up but we always finish 70% of our sprint and get around 30 points done per person.

I've been experimenting with different approaches to build a system where humans and agents can ship fast safely.

I'm in the middle of migrating our design system and it's fun to see how much AI can do.

At scale you're always mid-migration but you never do a big-bang rewrite, right?

Ever worked with a useful software architect?

Can you believe I've been writing on swizec.com for 20 years?

In the last few months every engineer I hired stumbled in exactly the same way: Project management.

No matter how much code you create, it's zero value until you ship.

The death of engineering has been greatly exaggerated.

Hiring engineers is like deciding what kind of system you'll have.

This is a war story.

Good software is invisible and most metrics are wrong.

Kent C.

Clara Shih talked with Chip Huyen and me about what companies look for in new grad engineers now that AI writes a lot of the code.

AI has turned work into a slot machine.

Traditional engineering levels were about skill progression.

You know what's better than a code review comment?

With all the AI stuff one day you feel useless, another day you feel top of the world with an army of agents building big things that used to take weeks.

Mark Erikson and Carl Vitullo talked with me about using AI coding tools at work.

I've been digging into agents for internal tooling and processes.

Funfact: When candidates put AI on their resume, the key thing I try to find out is whether they used evals.

This week I was shocked to learn that AI now writes 97% of my production code.

Read more papers.

[name|Friend], we talk a lot about outcomes over outputs and how engineers are supposed to get us over the water, not blindly build a bridge because someone asked for a bridge.

Frustration is your greatest engineering asset.

Yesterday I told a candidate "Using AI in our coding interview is encouraged" and his eyes sparkled.

The best engineers I know never talk about their AI setup.

Daniel from JS-Craft talked with me about choosing the right priorities, writing as an engineering skill, startup bets, remote work, and lessons from Scaling Fast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

How you approach software engineering makes it harder or easier to handle interruptions and other chaos.

Your resume titles don't matter.

This week I’ve been recording the audiobook for Scaling Fast.

You might enjoy this podcast episode.

Sylvain Kalache and I talked about why code is cheap and reliability is not.

When people talk about all the jobs AI will soon automate away pay close attention.

Engineers make big money by building scalable long-term assets.

How fast you do code review is how fast you do everything.

Production systems are always mid-migration.

When code gets cheap operational excellence wins.

Here's how to navigate a tough job market from someone dumb enough to have done it before.

My biggest career miss was saying No to Shopify two years before IPO.

Minutes of planning save you days of programming.

What's the problem with end-to-end tests?

Last week I asked if you're playing games you want to win.

As we enter the funny week-without-time between Christmas and New Year, it's a great time to reflect.

The key to 10x results is to remove 9x of the work.

Hockeystick moments are the biggest opportunity of your career.

Hiring managers look for 2 things in a resume.

You were asked to lead or own a project.

Ball of mud is the world's most popular software architecture.