The times are changing, and fast. Just a month ago I wrote about my skepticism, maybe even pessimism, about AI coding tools. My conclusion was that AI was a force multiplier for both good and bad, and with worries about an incoming "slopacalypse". I would characterize my feelings…
My conclusion has been that AI tools are force multipliers. But just think about the skill of the average person. Think about the quality of average, publicly-available code. The average force is close to zero or even negative.…
Every line of code is a bet that it will provide more business value than it will cause maintenance burden and cognitive load on future engineers…
The robots are coming for my job, and I want them to take it…
When vibes beat the desire for correctness, welcome to the future with AI…
When you have to store and retrieve data from a database, do you choose to execute SQL statements yourself or do you use an object-relational mapper (ORM) to abstract away those calls completely? My answer to that question has been "SQL, obviously" my entire career; ORMs have historically…
The database is often the only stateful portion of a service. As such, software engineers rely on it for everything that asks "what did I say about this last time?" or "can you hold this for the next time I'm here?" Modern relational databases…
Sometimes the worst times make us reflect in productive ways. This holiday season as I coughed up a lung and sweat through 2 shirts a night, I stared angrily at the ceiling through several nights with thousands of thoughts a minute rolling through my head. Most related to my current…