Writing

For the first month I treated Copilot like a junior engineer with ambition and no guardrails. It created variables named R and T, broke tests it didn't care about, and left me cleaning up for two hours.

A senior engineer posted on Reddit recently about how it's almost like he's in grief. More than a decade of craft. The things he loved. And now it's all changing.

AI is amplifying the technical debt you were already permitting. The slop in your codebase isn't a tool problem ... it's a permission problem.

We stopped talking about DevOps. Now everything uses it. AI is slowly crossing that same threshold.

We treat AI like a vending machine. Prompt in, code out. When it fails, we prompt harder. That's nonsensical.

I built a dashboard to track PR review times. What I found broke my assumptions about code review culture. Large PRs were getting approved almost as fast as small ones ... and that says everything about where we're actually paying attention.

Accountability means knowing why. When AI breaks something, there's no 'why' to interrogate. Until you define it.

Every productivity system I tried assumed my brain could be disciplined into submission. They were all solving the wrong problem.

Every junior engineer thinks the job is syntax. Every senior engineer knows it's the conversation three weeks before the syntax. AI just made that clearer than ever.