Ai

If you spend hours every day reading LinkedIn posts and Substacks about software engineering like I do you’ll notice everybody has decided that coding is no longer the bottleneck. I’ve read some version of that sentence a dozen times this month. What I haven’t seen is much agreement about what replaced it. What folks are saying: Problem-finding. Jensen Huang: “The purpose of a software engineer is to solve known problems and to find new problems to solve. Coding is one of the tasks.” He said nothing would give him more joy than if none of his engineers were coding at all. ...

Eighteen months ago, I wouldn’t have guessed we’d be removing Peer Review on pull requests. Over the last several months I’ve watched this team spend increasing effort trying to get pull requests reviewed. Not because people were avoiding reviews. Quite the opposite. They reminded each other in Slack, randomly assigned reviewers to beat the bystander effect, coordinated schedules, built skills and nudged each other throughout the day. Eventually I realized what this optimization of the review process was telling me. ...

I build with AI every day, and I have pushed my teams to do the same. We have rolled out AI tooling across engineering, built production agents for the boring work, and I spend real time coaching engineers on how to get more out of these tools. I am not a skeptic. I think this is the biggest shift in how we build software in my career. So I want to be careful about how I say the next part, because it is not a complaint about AI. It is a warning about what AI does to us. ...