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Some thoughts on AI (I'm resisting writing a blog post because I have nothing of great value tbh, but it is a hard force to resist): I understand a bit better people who say it's fun to use. It kind of is if you have something you want to build and if there is a lot of boring code to get there.

I still don't get how people are vibe coding or even letting the AI go off and write code based on a loose design. I find I have to spec the work carefully, generate small-ish chunks of changes and interact a lot, and spend a lot of time reviewing.

It's getting better so quickly! Even compared to a few months ago, it is significantly better at coding. It is surprising how good it can be and occasionally surprising how stupid it can be. It seems hard to have a good intuition for when it will do well and do badly.

I'm more worried than ever about the junior to senior engineer pipeline. It seems clear to me that SWE with AI still requires a lot of experience to do well, and I don't see how new engineers are going to get that experience in industry.

I hate reviewing AI-generated code (including the code I prompted). I still get annoyed waiting for the AI to 'think'. Too short to context switch, too long to stare.

Finding reasonable best practices and general advice is hard, I guess because AI is moving fast, controversial, and there's a lot of crank stuff it gets a lot of attention. Also the Claude docs are kinda bad for that.