Getting better at the job, and getting the next one.
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Everyone knows how to read a book. Beginning at the first page, you read each word in order, stopping periodically to think, until you arrive at the last word on the last page. That’s how you read a newspaper article, or a poem, or an email. Why would reading code be any…
A look into what has changed, what’s still the same – and what’s broken – in the tech industry. The full video and the summary of my keynote at LDX3 New York
Neetcode is the most well-known coding interview prep creator with over 1M+ subs on YouTube.
Open-source alternatives across 19 workflows, from coding to voice. Choose your tools, bring your model, and know when to keep paying.
The idea of “superpersuasion” has been floating around the AI safety community for decades. Now that powerful and difficult-to-control LLMs have appeared, people are again talking about the idea that a sufficiently intelligent AI might be able to persuade people to do whatever…
There are lots of skills involved in being a successful engineer at a big tech company. Running effective meetings, writing good design docs, fleshing out tickets and epics, improving team processes, tech leading small groups of engineers, and so on. But all of these rest on the…
It isn’t hard to torture an LLM. You simply extract a steering vector that corresponds with LLM “discomfort”, then artificially boost that steering vector. Tortured LLMs will describe experiencing negative feelings and will press a “pain relief” button even when it conflicts…
Also: OpenAI’s platform play that has similarities to AWS, more data on companies moving to open models, and more
Cockroach Labs co-founder Peter Mattis discusses building reliable distributed systems and how AI helps him write more code without sacrificing quality.
It’s only been a year since the e-commerce platform declared it was very happy with React Native, but now Shopify is dumping it – and the reason, unsurprisingly, is AI
In this episode, I asked Ethan Evans (ex-Amazon VP) question about common situations in corporate politics but they get increasingly dark.
Everyone can generate code. Trusted engineers know what’s worth shipping, and use AI and mentors to build that judgment.
It’s common to compare the current AI takeover of software engineering to the rise of AI in chess. Chess AIs went from much weaker than serious players to much stronger than even the strongest humans. Between those points, there was a middle period dominated by “centaurs”…
37signals – the creator of Ruby on Rails (RoR) – moves over to agents generating nearly all its code. Also: Amazon and Meta struggle to hire engineers, code reviews will probably also go away and more
Philip Su grew quickly to a Distinguished Engineer at Facebook and OpenAI. We discussed the psychology of peaking in your career.
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.
In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was often quite silly. As LLMs…
In this episode, my goal was to record a conversation that was completely free of any “AI doom” content.
AI should accelerate delivery, not lower your standards. Turn engineering judgment into context, constraints, and checks that scale
We previously noted that, while it's easier than ever to hit a particular quality bar by having coding agents use effective test techniques, software quality seems to be getting worse, indicating that whatever defaults developers are using may not work very well. Here, we test…
The 3 rules from Scarcity Brain that turn AI coding into a loop you want to repeat, without confusing more output with progress.
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I…
I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work, but most people I talk to don't see anything like this. For a long time, I thought this had something to do with how I use computers…
The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everything in assembly, but some…
