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The case for regulating AI companions
In April, OpenAI screwed up by releasing a version of GPT-4o that was overly sycophantic. If you told it that Brian Cox was sending you secret messages in the last...
How to actually use Model Context Protocol
Everyone’s very excited about Model Context Protocol, or MCP for short. In a sentence, MCP is a universal protocol for exposing sets of tools to AI agents - instead of...
Vibe coding and the silent AI war inside tech companies
I recently wrote an article for LeadDev about how software engineers are dealing with the AI hype in practice. Here’s my position, in short: I think AI is pretty great....
Practical notes on getting LLMs to generate new ideas
Large language models struggle to generate new ideas. To AI skeptics, this seems trivially true, since they believe LLMs can only regurgitate content from their training data1. To AI believers,...
The three great virtues of an AI-assisted programmer
In 1991, Larry Wall famously wrote that the three great virtues of a programmer were “laziness, impatience, and hubris”. A programmer should be lazy enough that they go to great...
Building an RTS where you issue orders to AI agents
I’ve always been interested by the third-act turn in Ender’s Game where the child strategists switch from directly controlling units to giving higher-level strategic orders. The communication problem just seems...
METR's AI productivity study is really good
I complain a lot on this blog about AI studies. Given that, I ought to give credit when an AI study comes out that I think is really good. Yesterday...
Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs
I recently read a very good blog post by Halvar Flake titled “A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs”. Here’s a very brief summary: LLMs are just a mapping function between language...
Mecha-Hitler, Grok, and why it's so hard to give LLMs the right personality
Recently, xAI’s Grok model made some very strange comments. In a now-deleted post, it suggested Adolf Hitler as the right person to deal with “anti-white hate”. It also pointed out...
The more senior engineers get, the more results matter
In my experience, people tend to overrate how much moving up the org chart changes the fundamentals of the job. As a staff engineer, I do more or less the...
How I use LLMs to learn new subjects
If you want to learn about a new subject in 2025, one of the best ways to do it is to ask a strong language model. The reason this method...
How to become passionate about delivering shareholder value
I am passionate about delivering shareholder value. It feels kind of embarrassing to admit, but it’s true1. I like all the things an engineer is supposed to like - writing...
Building tiny AI tools for developer productivity
The two current paradigms of AI app development are agentic coding (using an AI to help you write your ordinary line-of-business code faster) and building AI apps for mass consumption...
What happens when engineers work more than one job
There’s a news story going around about an engineer called Soham1 who was routinely “overemployed”: he maintained remote jobs at multiple tech companies simultaneously, collecting their salaries in parallel. When...
Continuous AI in software engineering
When I use AI in my software engineering job, I use it “on tap”: when I have a problem that I’d like to run past the LLM, I go and...
I don't care if my manager writes code
I write a lot about how the post-2010s economic squeeze has made it harder to be a software engineer at a large tech company. But I haven’t said much about...
AI coding agents are already commoditized
All of a sudden, it’s the year of AI coding agents. Claude released Claude Code, OpenAI released their Codex agent, GitHub released its own autonomous coding agent1, and so on...
Pure and impure software engineering
Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers? Why do high-profile external hires to large companies often fizzle out? Why is AI-assisted development amazing...
Everything I know about good system design
I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post, presumably aimed at people who are new...
What's going to happen to junior engineers?
In the 2010s, companies were hiring a lot of juniors. This was partially an economic decision: companies were hiring everyone, and juniors were a lot cheaper and easier to hire...