August 2026/16 entries

I was excited to see that this is the first module in a new Coursera course I'm doing. I've long thought that ethics are missing from software development, and I think it's more important than ever to care about the consequences of what we're doing and building in this age of AI. This course on building agents literally opens with this statement:

This module is for professionals and data scientists aiming to build responsible AI.

I'm really heartened to see that building responsibly is becoming a legitimate concern, at least in some corners of the industry.

By bridging theory and practice, the program empowers you to lead initiatives that prioritize accountability, ensuring your AI systems deliver immense value without compromising integrity or public trust.

I'm looking forward to this.

Well this is awkward. Literally yesterday I wrote “the hard part of software engineering was never writing the code.” I concede that that way of describing what’s happening to the software industry is a bit lazy and exaggerated.

Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is clear many aspects of work and life will be transformed—including programming.

This definitely feels true to me. My day to day is already completely unrecognizable compared to a year ago and I wouldn’t have known how to even begin describing the nature of my job now if you’d asked me to only a few months ago.

If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?

This is answerable though, in terms of economics. How hard a skill is isn’t what determines its price. It’s true that a very small proportion of the labour force is willing to put up with solving abstract symbolic logic puzzles for 40 hours a week, but the main reason software engineers are so highly paid is more because the marginal cost of scaling software is effectively zero than anything to do with the work itself. Lots of jobs are harder and pay less.

I have met many programmers throughout my career, and very few of them want to talk to stakeholders, much less customers (exceptions are freelancers and founders, especially of software development shops). And, “having clarity on the priorities” boils down to “just tell me what to do and don't switch it up every two days

Relatable.

Whoever you are, don't outsource your understanding, judgement, empathy and taste to AI.

This feels like the most important takeaway for this moment. What drives me more crazy than anything else these days is people trying to pass off AI generated output as their own. It’s lazy and inconsiderate to ask someone to read piles of slop on your behalf, but that’s not even what I hate the most about it. It’s the abdication of our unique human ability to relate to other humans that gets me. I wish people would stop pretending like generated AI output could ever replace human interaction.

I finally got around to getting my website back up and running. Years ago now I started the process of re-building my website (yet again), this time as a link blog. I finally finished getting the machinery working and old content ported over, then of course had to bikeshed the UI for a few days. Anyway one thing I wanted was different colours for the different types of entries. But eyeballing them was leading to poor choices that were hard to read, so I built this tool to make it easier to find colours that still meet contrast requirements for readability on the web.

I’d never heard about this conference before, the talks look super interesting. I wish more people in the industry cared about working software. The bar seems to only be getting lower in this age of AI. I always love finding a batch of new people to follow and new conferences to daydream about attending.