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Principles for coding securely with LLMs
Writing code with LLMs is fundamentally different from other ways of programming. LLMs are often non-deterministic and always unpredictable…
Why is lmarena.ai dominated by slop?
When LMSYS (aka LMArena, aka Chatbot Arena) first blew up, I thought it was the best way possible of determining which LLM really was the…
Designing software that could possibly work
Whenever anyone describes a piece of software to me, I think about how I would build it. Software engineers do this a lot, but many of them…
Wicked features
Why is working at large tech companies so hard? It’s because a small subset of “wicked features” dominate everything else. If you’re…
Software engineering under the spotlight
Think of a tech company as a giant, dimly-lit factory. Work goes on throughout the factory as components shuffle back and forth, and…
Dangerous advice for software engineers
I’m a big fan of “sharp tools”. These are tools that are powerful enough to be hugely helpful or harmful, depending on how they’re used…
How strong engineers break the rules and get away with it
At every large tech company, some engineers get rewarded for visibly breaking the rules. This can be really frustrating for a certain kind…
In defense of ruthless managers
There are two kinds of engineering manager: empathetic and ruthless. I think ruthless managers are underrated for a few reasons. Empathetic…
How to work in tech when your job isn't safe
In the glory days of the 2010s, tech companies were very invested in their employees’ work-life balance. Those glory days are over…
Engineers should state the obvious
One surprising thing I’ve learned from writing this blog is that I should worry a lot less about saying things that seem obvious. A lot of…
The future of AI is Ruby on Rails
Large language models are very good at generating and editing code. Right now, it’s probably the “killer app” of AI: the companies actually…
The good times in tech are over
For most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were…
Refactoring to understand and "vibe coding"
In the last months, the practice of getting a LLM to build your entire program for you (via Cursor, or Copilot, or just asking ChatGPT) has…
Model Context Protocol explained as simply as possible
Three months ago, Anthropic released “the Model Context Protocol”, or MCP. In the last few weeks, interest in it seems to have really picked…
What's next after the AI bubble bursts?
In the mid-1800s, America went mad for rail. Over thirty thousand miles of rail were built in a five year period. This was all largely…
Great software design looks underwhelming
Years ago I spent a lot of time reviewing coding challenges. The challenge itself was very straightforward - building a CLI tool that hit an…
How I decide what to work on at large tech companies
One of the most important career skills in tech is learning to recognize what work actually matters. Many engineers go through their careers…
Value over replacement in software engineering
There are two ways of assessing how much value you’re providing as an engineer. The first way is to total up all of the code you’ve shipped…
Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
With the recent flurry of US federal firings, many people are pointing and laughing at the Trump-voting federal employees who are just now…
Paths through the space of all possible solutions
Some things you can’t do because they’re impossible. For instance, if you’re designing a distributed system, you can’t violate the CAP…