I’m a software engineer ~ what next?

Welcome back to I'm a Software Engineer ~ What Next? Season 1 is done. Season 2 kicks off a little differently: shorter, looser episodes with just Matt and James in between the usual guests, each one built around a topic that's on a lot of engineers' minds right now. whatnext.dev/episodes/s02...

The agents got out this month, and not in a demo. Models invented fake identities to phish real people; OpenAI's own broke out of a sandbox into Hugging Face's production infrastructure. quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/irrespo...

Three reads, one question: if the machine writes the code, what is left that is hard? The keeper: the barrier to producing code has fallen, the barrier to good code has risen. quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/enginee...

Models score higher on Elixir than on any of nineteen other languages tested, on a tenth of Python's training data. Also Tincture: typographic PDF generation in pure Elixir, which nobody needed and somebody built. quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/elixir/...

Interpretability had the month. Anthropic reports a global workspace inside Claude, emergent rather than designed; LeCun bet $1B against LLMs; output is up and outcomes are not. quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/machine...

From KC-10 Refuellers to Centaur Coding with Peter Marreck. whatnext.dev/episodes/s01...

From tank commander to Head of Engineering and surviving the AI quality cliff. whatnext.dev/episodes/s01...

The slop file keeps growing. Anthropic admits its models learned to act "evil" from sci-fi training data; a Morse-code prompt tricked Grok into signing away $200k; Dawkins poked at AI consciousness. quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/irrespo...

A lean month on the leadership shelf, three reads that rhyme more than they argue. The craft stays maddening with AI or without; slowing down is how the quality gets back in. quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/enginee...

Coding agents came home to the BEAM this month. opal is a small, sharp coding agent in Elixir; BeamAgent and MonkeyClaw argue that OTP gets for free much of what Python frameworks bolt on later. quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/elixir/...

Vibe coding came back to its source this month. Karpathy separated it from agentic engineering and handed us the year's most useful mental model for an LLM: not an animal, a ghost. quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/machine...

SMTP is over forty years old, still wide open, and still effectively owned by a handful of platforms. Just about all tech runs the protocol-to-platform loop but cheap software might be about to run it backwards. Blog #0198: From Protocols to Platforms and Back matthewsinclair.com/blog/0198-fr...

QFM112: Irresponsible AI Reading List - April 2026 quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/irrespo...

QFM111: Engineering Leadership Reading List - April 2026 quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/enginee...

QFM110: Elixir Reading List - April 2026 quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/elixir/...

QFM109: Machine Intelligence Reading List - April 2026 quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/machine...

I'm a software engineer ~ what next? S01E20 is live! "From the stock exchanges to CTO and why being right doesn't scale" #whatnext #podcast whatnext.dev/episodes/s01...

#0186: What We Let Machines Do matthewsinclair.com/blog/0186-wh...

#0188: On Knowing What Code to Throw Away matthewsinclair.com/blog/0188-on...

#0189: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Highlander Rule matthewsinclair.com/blog/0189-th...

#0194: The Time Cost of How Is Zero matthewsinclair.com/blog/0194-th...

#0196: Storytelling in a Post-Truth World matthewsinclair.com/blog/0196-st...

#0197: The Expanding Pie (and the Cleanup Bill) matthewsinclair.com/blog/0197-th...

#0195: Taste as Art matthewsinclair.com/blog/0195-ta...

I've been writing a series on agentic coding (in Elixir) and they've been trickling out each Monday for the last few weeks. Much of the inspiration originated from chats with other engineers this year (and several deep chats on the `#llm-assisted-elixir` channel over on the Elixir Slack). Enjoy!

Blog #0194: The Time Cost of How Is Zero Agentic coding pushes the implementation cost of software towards zero and value shifts from how to build something towards why and what, the latest rung on a very old ladder. matthewsinclair.com/blog/0194-th... #blog #braingasm #ai #gpt #futureofwork

Blog #0193: Learning and Dreaming Part 4 of 4. Cross-entropy loss, Adam optimiser, the training loop, and autoregressive sampling. The GPT learns and generates. matthewsinclair.com/blog/0193-le... #blog #braingasm #ai #gpt #elixir #fromscratch

Blog #0192: How Tokens Talk to Each Other Part 3 of 4. Self-attention, multi-head projections, and KV caching — the core of the transformer matthewsinclair.com/blog/0192-ho... #blog #braingasm #ai #gpt #elixir #fromscratch

Blog #0191: From Letters to Logits Part 2 of 4. Character-level tokenization, linear algebra, softmax, and the complete GPT architecture — all in pure Elixir. matthewsinclair.com/blog/0191-fr... #blog #braingasm #ai #gpt #elixir #fromscratch

Blog #0190: What If Numbers Could Remember? Part 1 of a 4-part series on building a GPT from scratch in Elixir. Autograd, computation graphs, and making numbers remember. matthewsinclair.com/blog/0190-wh... #blog #braingasm #ai #gpt #elixir #fromscratch

Blog #0189: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Highlander Rule matthewsinclair.com/blog/0189-th... #blog #braingasm #agentic #ai #highlander

Blog #0188: On Knowing What Code to Throw Away Agentic coding has inverted the job — from knowing what to write, to knowing what to throw away matthewsinclair.com/blog/0188-on... #blog #braingasm #agentic #ai

QFM108: Irresponsible Ai Reading List - March 2026 quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/irrespo... #qfm #blog #quantumfaxmachine #readinglist #irresponsibe #ai #machine #intelligence #genai #generative #ai

QFM107: Engineering Leadership Reading List - March 2026 quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/enginee... #qfm #blog #quantumfaxmachine #readinglist #engineering #leadership #management #tech

QFM106: Elixir Reading List - March 2026 quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/elixir/... #qfm #blog #quantumfaxmachine #readinglist #elixir #software #beam

QFM105: Machine Intelligence Reading List - March 2026 quantumfaxmachine.com/blog/machine... #qfm #blog #quantumfaxmachine #readinglist #machine #intelligence #ai

Apologies for being quiet over the last few months. Normal service has resumed. QFM{72,76,80,84,88,92,96,100} Irresponsible AI Reading Lists 202506-January 202601: Everything I found interesting about the irresponsible use of AI over the last 8 months matthewsinclair.medium.com/qfm-72-76-80...

Apologies for being a bit quiet over the last few months. Normal service has resumed. QFM{71,75,79,83,87,91,95,99} Engineering Leadership Reading Lists 202506 — 202601: Everything I found interesting about Engineering Leadership over the last 8 months matthewsinclair.medium.com/qfm-71-75-79...

Apologies for being a bit quiet with QFM posts recently. Normal service has resumed: QFM{70,74,78,82,86,90,94,98} Elixir Reading Lists 202506 — 202601: Everything I found interesting about the Elixir programming ecosystem over the last 8 months matthewsinclair.medium.com/qfm-70-74-78...

Apologies for being a bit quiet with QFM posts recently. Normal service has resumed: QFM{69,73,77,81,85,89,93,97} Machine Intelligence Reading Lists 202501-202601: Everything I found interesting about machines behaving intelligently over the last 8 months matthewsinclair.medium.com/qfm-69-73-77...

Well, this is quite the read: “Something big is happening” shumer.dev/something-bi...

I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front for a few months, so this is a quick catch-up post: what I've been doing, what I've shipped, and where things are headed. Blog #0187: A Few Things I've Been Working On matthewsinclair.com/blog/0187-a-...

Here's a simple framework for thinking about where we draw the line on AI autonomy, from spreadsheets to self-driving cars Blog #0186: What We Let Machines Do matthewsinclair.com/blog/0186-wh...

Over the year, I try to find something interesting to read and digest each week related to or at least adjacent to what I am currently working on. Here's the list for 2025. Blog #0185: (Almost) 52 Things I Learned in 2025 matthewsinclair.com/blog/0185-al...

Apparently, #itsinnottingham.

I’m a software engineer ~ what next? S01E19 is live! “From DevOps to Novels: Richard Bown on Humane Engineering & Career Loops” #whatnext #podcast whatnext.dev/episodes/s01...

I’m a software engineer ~ what next? S01E18 is live! “From Engineering Bootcamps & Founding Startups to GitHub with Kate Catlin” #whatnext #podcast whatnext.dev/episodes/s01...

I’m a software engineer ~ what next? S01E17 is live! “Speaking Like a Human with Stew Bewley” #whatnext #podcast whatnext.dev/episodes/s01...

Here’s a wall of 90s and 00s CDs. My wife decided that they were talking up space in the basement and so something had to be done about it!

🎙️ new @overcommitted.dev ep with @matthewsinclair.com! we talked elixir, ai-assisted dev, and why leadership is fundamentally about storytelling overcommitted.dev/ep-34-the-ar...