The Principal Engineer

Last week, I wrote about Antipatterns of Software Engineering with AI.

I have been building software with AI since I got my hands on the first private previews of Github Copilot.

Proclamations of “coding is a solved problem” has been coming in fast and heavy in the last year, attributed to the rise of AI tools like Claude Code.

What started out as an impressive AI demo is finally in production.

The definition of an artisan in Wikipedia: An artisan (from French: artisan, Italian: artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand.

For thirty years, the standard playbook of lowering cost of software production was to move high cost software development from places like San Francisco, New York, London or Zurich, to low-cost locations like Pune, Bangalore or Manila.

Software engineering isn’t being replaced, it is both becoming a purer form of what it always was, and something entirely different to what it has been.

I wrote in late 2024 about how I use AI for Software Engineering. 12-14 months is a lifetime in this tech cycle, and as a consequence, my entire workflow has completely changed.

The discussion about AI-generated code, whether coming from hype-merchants, or skeptics, frequently makes it sound as if you should stop thinking about the code and architecture and just accept it as is, once it compiles and seemingly works.

I have been on the Generative AI train since before day one.

William Stanley Jevons, father of Jevons Paradox When intelligence becomes abundant, demand for it will explode.

Fever dreams of having AI write all our complex software for us are still largely that, fever dreams.

I’ve seen many discussions on LinkedIn and social media lately on whether a CTO should be hands-on.

For the last 15 years, the default move for startups and enterprises alike has been to move their compute needs to the three big Hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure).

Steam-punk browser The last 15 years has seen us move from backend-rendered webapps to Single-Page-Applications (“SPA”), to hybrid approaches like Next.js and Remix.

Cloud native architectures brought about the technical viability of microservices.

I have used almost exclusively Macs since about 2007, but had my first Linux desktop in the late 1990’ies while at university.