The blog · since 2015
Essays, playbooks and field notes from our CTOs, architects and leads. Written for people shipping real product.
A language model never sees your words. Text is chopped into tokens, each token gets an ID, and each ID gets a spot on a map where meaning is defined by what sits nearby. The fluency you see is built entirely from patterns in numbers.
A language model never sees your words. Text is chopped into tokens, each token gets an ID, and each ID gets a spot on a map where meaning is defined by what sits nearby. The fluency you see is built entirely from patterns in numbers.
A line in a notes app promises one day, if I have time, and never says what to do next. A clickable design does: it shows the missing screen, the obvious feature and the person you want to send it to. Ideas should land as prototypes, not as lines in a list.
Mutation testing was always too slow to run on a whole codebase, so nobody did. Agents change that: they touch a handful of files, don't mind a two-minute run, and escaped mutants tell them exactly which tests check nothing. A targeted Infection setup for PHP, plus the agent instructions.
Classifiers stopped spotting AI output once models got good. Watermarks hide a keyed statistical bias in text, images and proteins instead. But marking output is only half the job: without shared keys, nobody else can detect it.
Only three steps between an idea and a preview link need a human: answering questions, approving the plan and checking the result. A GitHub Action routes issue and PR events to a Claude routine that refines, builds test-first and fixes review feedback. The real effort goes into when not to proceed.
AI made doing more almost effortless, and that is the problem. When every quiet moment becomes a chance to ask another question or kick off another agent, you trade one deep experience for a dozen forgettable hits. Work at 20x, enjoy life at 1x.
An LLM does one thing: it predicts the next token. Training nudges that guess towards the right answer billions of times, attention lets it look back at the tokens that matter, and chaining guesses together turns a prediction into an essay.
Running agents in parallel turned engineers into notification processors. Defending focus is a losing fight. The job now is making interruptions affordable: visible signals, no friction, finished work you can walk away from, and more valuable work within reach.
AI made code cheap, so the bottleneck has moved from how to build to what to build. Strategic DDD matters more than ever, whilst tactical patterns like aggregates matter less as AI writes and reads more of the code.
Documentation rots, and what your product does ends up in a few developers' heads. So I stopped writing docs and started extracting them: small, typed, linked notes pulled from the codebase, written for product, with every claim traced back to the line it came from.
Most agentic pipelines chase throughput by taking humans out of the loop. Better products come from small, isolated pipelines that raise quality at each human handover, from bug reports and refinement to pull requests and releases, whilst domain knowledge stays with people.
Fyxer's per-seat price more than doubled, so we built our own meeting notetaker in one night with Claude Code. A blind benchmark on our own bilingual meetings, EU-only storage, and a per-hour cost that puts the whole company below what nine Fyxer seats now cost.
When implementation becomes cheap, what's left? I stopped writing code, ventured into machine learning and 3D game development, and discovered that AI made me remarkably efficient at making mistakes. Fortunately, it also made me much faster at learning from them.
My first software factory flooded the team with pull requests nobody asked for. The second one had the same problem, just with better visibility. It only started working when the team took ownership and the factory began to encode what we believe good engineering looks like.
As a kid, your skills could only get you so far in a game. Sometimes the game itself was the problem. AI fixed a decades-old goalkeeper bug from a short video, and the real shift is what that means for anyone with an idea.
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