Before You Buy Another AI Subscription
Open-source alternatives across 19 workflows, from coding to voice. Choose your tools, bring your model, and know when to keep paying.
15 min read
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Strategize Your Career
Newsletter by Fran Soto
Actionable strategies to earn more, save time, and learn faster.
13 posts in the last 90 days · newest 4 Oct
Become an AI-Second Engineer
Everyone can generate code. Trusted engineers know what’s worth shipping, and use AI and mentors to build that judgment.
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The 10 Habits for a Good Software Engineering Day
There is always more work than time. These protocols help you choose what matters, protect focused engineering work, and finish the day ready for tomorrow.
10 min read
You Don’t Have Time to Skip Software Quality
AI should accelerate delivery, not lower your standards. Turn engineering judgment into context, constraints, and checks that scale
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Addicted to Coding
The 3 rules from Scarcity Brain that turn AI coding into a loop you want to repeat, without confusing more output with progress.
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You Need a Think Week
A practical system for escaping busywork, rebuilding clarity, and making better engineering decisions without taking a full week off
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Don’t Become a Proxy Between AI and Code
A zoom-in, zoom-out system for increasing AI-assisted coding throughput without losing the technical judgment needed to improve it
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More Agents Won’t Fix Your Productivity
Productivity after AI is less about typing and more about these 4 principles
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Do You Actually Understands Your Codebase?
AI agents can improve code while eroding the shared understanding teams need to debug, evolve, and defend it.
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Faster AI Is Fragmenting Your Attention
A practical system for batching AI-assisted work, designing clean handoffs, and running multiple agents without multitasking yourself
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AI Wrote More Code. Who Reviews It?
My multi-agent AI code review system finds, verifies, and ranks issues before I open the pull request.
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1000 PRs Won't Prove You're Promotion Ready
The artifact pipeline for turning designs, reviews, launches, and incidents into evidence your manager can defend.
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AI setup for software engineers: My 5-part system
Project context, reusable skills, isolated workspaces, and evidence loops: the system I use to orchestrate coding agents.
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What Is an AI Native Software Engineer?
Buying Cursor does not make you AI-native. The real skill is defining the context, tools, loops, and evidence that make agents reliable.
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Stop using AI as a chat box
Use AI for investigation, review, and QA reports, while keeping architecture, product risk, and ownership with the human.
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This is for engineers falling behind on AI
Most teams do not need frontier AI. They need one safe workflow other engineers can copy.
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Loop Engineering: Designing Systems That Prompt
Get the free AI Agent Building Blocks ebook when you subscribe:
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You’re Not Behind. This is Your Problem
A batter way to reset your software engineering career without starting over or chasing every new title.
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Read this before your org gets cut
Layoffs do not always mean you failed. They often reveal whether your work is visible, funded, and portable.
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The Smallest Reliable Working Set
Bigger context windows won’t fix bad workflows. The real skill is deciding what an agent should load, forget, and persist.
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