It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only…
Why Can’t Programmers... Program?
I was incredulous when I read this observation from Reginald Braithwaite: Like me, the author is having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever. The author he’s
Note on 24th September 2026
The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking …
Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It
In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.
Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It - …
archived 16 Mar 2026 15:14:04 UTC
Boris Tane
Coding agents didn't make poor engineers dangerous. They made them unstoppable.
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog
The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now.
"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers — Senko Rašić
The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is c...
Write-Only Code | Heavybit
AI may be accelerating software into a world of "write-only" code that forces a rethink of culture, processes, and tools. Heavybit’s Joseph Ruscio explains.
Reading Code Is Hard, and tips to improve - Trisha Gee
This week's video for Dave Farley's Continuous Delivery YouTube channel is me ranting about why reading code sucks, and offering some advice on how to improve. "Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. ... Read more
In defense of not reading the code | Ben Shoemaker
Last week, I wrote an article whose purpose was to discuss where I saw AI-assisted coding going. That's not what generated 200 comments worth of passionate...
No Coding Before 10am | Michael Bloch
Engineering is no longer about writing code. Here is one startup's playbook for building in the AI agent era.
A break from programming languages
This is a blog post I have been considering writing for a long time.
The peril of laziness lost | The Observation Deck
In his classic Programming Perl — affectionately known to a generation of technologists as "the Camel Book" — Larry Wall famously wrote of the three virtues of a programmer as laziness, impatience, and hubris: If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design. We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have defined a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine. To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste. Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.
Software Should Be Allowed to Be Weird - Ewan’s Blog
A fairly large amount of the software I write would probably die in a corporate planning meeting. There would be questions about the target audience, the bu…
You can code only 4 hours per day. Here’s why.
Most of us have felt it: after a few solid hours of coding, your brain starts shutting down.
