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You have to beat the models at something
In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their company, but how much they would have...
Selling out
In 1973, Tom Lehrer famously sang that “selling out is easy to do”. That may have been true in the seventies, but it’s not true today: selling out requires both...
You should never be angry at work
I try not to give a lot of prescriptive advice about working in tech companies1. There are many ways to be successful, and every company works differently. If you’re shipping...
Readers can't identify watermarked AI text
In the last few weeks, I’ve been complaining that everyone is wrong about AI watermarking: it isn’t really anti-consumer and it doesn’t make the outputs any worse. The watermarking papers...
Good writing is obvious, not original
When you write, you should try to say things that are obviously true, and spend very little time worrying about whether you’re being original. Ironically, this is the best way...
Help peer
One of the most influential 20th century pieces of writing about AI is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. Although there are many humans in the story, the protagonist is the...
AI text watermarking is not a big deal
People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude model outputs. Will this lead to a mass exodus from Anthropic models?...
No, local models will not win
Every time a new open-weight AI model is released, people say that local models are the future. Why spend billions of dollars building out datacenters when everyone will just be...
Advanced AI sycophancy
Everyone knows that AI sycophancy is when the model tells you how smart you are. Wow, you’re absolutely right. That’s not just a new idea — it’s genuinely groundbreaking. You’re...
I got an email about resistance
This will be kind of an unusual post. I got a recent email about my writing that I thought was such a good articulation of one common criticism that I’d...
How to keep thinking
Imagine you’re the guest on some kind of frenetic, software-engineering-themed game show. The host is constantly flipping over new cards with questions that you have to answer as fast as...
Giving and taking credit in big tech companies
Engineers often complain that visibility should be their manager’s job. In other words, they think engineers should be able to focus on the code, while their manager figures out who’s...
AI models need moral support to make discoveries
One recent development in AI is its ability to solve some long-standing problems in mathematics. In 2024 and 2025, this was a trickle: once or twice a year somebody would...
You don't have to be smart if you can think clearly
When you’re on fire, problems are transparent: they’re solved simply by the act of looking at them. Even complicated layers of multiple problems can simply be glanced through like stacked...
LLMs reward expertise
In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your...
Powerful AIs might escape containment by releasing themselves as open-weight models
Before large language models, people who worried about AI safety often talked about the “boxing problem”. It goes like this. Suppose some genius figures out artificial intelligence in a late-night...
Impro is a handbook for running a cult
Here’s the big idea in Keith Johnstone’s book Impro: Children are naturally creative, but are violently formed into repressed adults by Western culture and education The process of becoming more...
Overtraining as the path to human-like AI
The anonymous blogger Gwern recently completed a thirteen thousand word post called Human-like Neural Nets by Catapulting, in which he offers a theory about why LLMs don’t possess truly flexible...
What does "playing politics" mean for software engineers?
Software engineers are often told to “start playing politics”, but most engineers have no idea what that means. Their reference point for “playing politics” comes from fiction like Game of...
In defense of not understanding your codebase
As a software engineer, how well do you have to understand your own codebase? My guess is that people who work on small codebases with low-turnover teams (say, Redis or...