This essay was originally written for and submitted to the Pragmatic Engineer essay contest in October 2026. At some point earlier this year I realized I was not enjoying work the way I used to. I'm the kind of person who likes solving problems for a living. On a good day I might even go so far as to say I enjoy the work of getting to the bottom of an issue and fixing it from first principles. […38 min read]
I use coding agents for basically all of my day day to work now. Recently I’ve been seeing more and more consumer-facing agent-like products and have been trying them out but find none are really able to do the things I want, mostly because they are all run by sketchy tech megacorps that I don’t trust and don’t want to connect my data to. Unfortunately Siri still really sucks, but in theory it’s more in the realm of what I actually want and Apple already owns my entire digital life anyway. […3 min read]
Writing software with AI is a really different experience than writing it by hand. Before coding agents, software was expensive to produce, in the sense that it required a lot of time from a lot of highly skilled and highly compensated people. Now, generating code is very cheap comparatively speaking, and the expensive part is deploying, operating, and maintaining it. […3 min read]
Maybe I’m just too cynical but it’s really starting to feel like more or less all of this new “AI”/agent software is vapourware. I’ve been trying to take this whole “agentic development” thing seriously and there is just so much friction in this ecosystem it’s absolutely insane. […3 min read]
It feels like the big LLMs have come full circle. At first they were too naive to implement meaningful features autonomously and took so much handholding to get anything done it was quite a pain babysitting them. Then they got good enough to do meaningful software engineering work and there was (I now recognize in hindsight) a sweet spot at some point early this year where they got meaningfully better and good enough to take non-trivial work off my hands without causing dramatically more work. […2 min read]
I've been hearing more and more things about jujutsu and want to try it out. It is so hard to learn new things that replace something I've been using almost every day for over 10 years though. The muscle memory is so ingrained and my mental model of what version control even is is so rigid, it's hard to wrap my head around the idea that it could be anything other than git's. My main motivation is that I've "heard" it's better for a) working with stacked branches and b) working on multiple worktrees (called workspaces) at once. These are both things I do way more now because of all the agent-driven-development stuff I'm learning than I ever did before and I feel like I am spending a ridiculous amount of time fighting git. But learning new things is so hard. Wish me luck.