seangoedecke.com RSS feed

A recent resignation tweet from an Anthropic researcher has everyone talking about the AI apocalypse again.

Just over a year ago I wrote Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs.

Automated AI text detection is currently an underserved niche.

A lot of people think that good leadership requires radical responsibility.

“Workslop” is when your colleagues or bosses communicate with you by pasting big chunks of AI-generated text.

In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their company, but how much they would have made compared to the average engineer in their position.

In 1973, Tom Lehrer famously sang that “selling out is easy to do”.

I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies1.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been complaining that everyone is wrong about AI watermarking: it isn’t really anti-consumer and it doesn’t make the outputs any worse.

When you write, you should try to say things that are obviously true, and spend very little time worrying about whether you’re being original.

One of the most influential 20th century pieces of writing about AI is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question.

People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude model outputs.

Every time a new open-weight AI model is released, people say that local models are the future.

Everyone knows that AI sycophancy is when the model tells you how smart you are.

This will be kind of an unusual post.

Imagine you’re the guest on some kind of frenetic, software-engineering-themed game show.

Engineers often complain that visibility should be their manager’s job.

One recent development in AI is its ability to solve some long-standing problems in mathematics.

When you’re on fire, problems are transparent: they’re solved simply by the act of looking at them.

In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet.

Before large language models, people who worried about AI safety often talked about the “boxing problem”.

Here’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro: Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed adults by Western culture and education The process of becoming more creative and expressive is largely a process of unlearning t…

The anonymous blogger Gwern recently completed a thirteen thousand word post called Human-like Neural Nets by Catapulting, in which he offers a theory about why LLMs don’t possess truly flexible human-like intelligence, and how we might train LLMs that do.

Software engineers are often told to “start playing politics”, but most engineers have no idea what that means.

As a software engineer, how well do you have to understand your own codebase?

Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it.

The European Union AI Act is Europe’s attempt to comprehensively regulate AI usage.

The European Union AI Act will begin to be enforceable in August 2026, one month from now1.

Stating the obvious is surprisingly useful.

Many people claim that AI inference is unprofitable to serve, and thus must be subsidized by an ocean of dumb money from investors who believe that some future AI model will come to dominate the world economy.