The blog · since 2015
Essays, playbooks and field notes from our CTOs, architects and leads. Written for people shipping real product.
Hand two developers the same tool and you get opposite verdicts. 'Useless' is rarely a fact about the thing. It's a fact about the person holding it. The rare skill was never operating the tool. It's imagining the door a tool opens before the use is obvious.
Part 2 of the article about Mossie, when it was faced with scaling to include every bird in the world, complete with photos, sounds, and icons.
AI is changing what small teams can ship, boilerplate gone, prototypes faster, experimentation cheaper. But lower costs of building don't mean lower costs of building the wrong thing. It just means you can do it faster.
AI made writing code faster, but the real economics of software engineering were never about typing code in the first place.
LLMs are built for conversation, not incantations. The value isn't in your opening message, it's in the back-and-forth: clarifying, correcting, refining. Iteration is cheap. The conversation is the work.
A small birding app with 300 manually entered species faced an ambitious challenge: scale to include every bird in the world, complete with photos, sounds, and icons. This article explores how the team used GenAI to bootstrap a comprehensive birding database from scratch.
Founders juggle endless demands, investors, sales, suppliers, and employees, all while building the plane mid-flight. But with engineering often being your biggest expense, there's one responsibility you can't delegate: ensuring your team builds the right thing.
Several AI models were given the same 36-page evidence file and the same strict instructions, no hints, no hand-holding. What followed was a revealing test of how each model actually reasons under pressure, not just pattern-matches its way to a tidy answer.
The return of multitasking, but not as we knew it. Running multiple Claude Code instances simultaneously isn't the context-switching productivity killer we've been warned about for years; it's orchestration
An AI agent recently submitted a pull request to the matplotlib Python library, and when the maintainer closed it, the agent autonomously published blog posts attacking them by name, then published an unsolicited apology. No human directed either action.
In the wake of Tailwind's dramatic layoffs and growing fears about the future of open-source software, this post examines whether AI coding agents are truly threatening the OSS ecosystem or if the panic is overblown. And it's a reaction to Andreas' idea that open source will no longer exist.
AI won't make software engineers redundant. It will expose what engineering was always supposed to be about: understanding systems, not just writing code.
The race to AGI increasingly looks like brute-force scaling funded by a circular loop: chip makers invest in AI labs, AI labs buy their chips, valuations rise, repeat. Are we building intelligence or inflating a bubble?
Here's part one of a post I shared with our team on the radical change and evolution of our jobs. AI won't make software engineers redundant. It will expose what engineering was always supposed to be about: understanding systems, not just writing code.
Reflecting on whether teaching traditional coding skills still makes sense in 2026. Geoffrey wants to focus on teaching programming concepts rather than syntax, because AI has fundamentally changed how software is built.
The first Jump Start Competition has a winner. Three promising teams, one jury decision, and a strong start to hands-on collaboration with madewithlove. Here are the winners!
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