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RSS FeedThoughts on Christian Voluntarism, technology, and personal growth
The Certainty Market
Clients say they want honest assessment. They purchase confident promises. This isn't hypocrisy; it's the certainty market in action. When a vendor projects total assurance, they're not selling expertise. They're offering to carry your anxiety for you. It's a kind of absolution. But what happens when the borrowed peace runs out and the jungle gets dark?
The Vibepocalypse
92% of developers now use AI coding tools daily. 45% of that code contains security flaws. Analysts project $1.5 trillion in technical debt by 2027. The six-month wall that keeps killing vibe-coded projects? It's legacy code on fast-forward, but with nobody to ask why the decisions were made. Because they weren't decisions. They were pattern matches. The vibepocalypse isn't the end of software development. It's the end of pretending you can skip the hard parts.
The AI Agent Reckoning: Why Most Will Fail and What the Survivors Look Like
40% of AI agent projects will be canceled by 2027. The reason? Most aren't agents at all; they're chatbots with better marketing. The survivors share one critical trait the failures ignore: they know the difference between orchestration and reasoning. Here's what separates the projects that deliver from the expensive pilots that quietly disappear.
The Skill Shift: What Enterprise Developers Need to Learn Now
The ability to write code from memory is becoming less valuable by the month. What's not automated is looking at a business problem and framing it correctly, pushing back when a product owner hands you a solution disguised as a requirement. The premium is shifting from "can you implement this algorithm" to "can you define the right problem and communicate effectively while you build it?"
Humility in the Age of AI Gurus and Hot Takes
Everyone's predicting AI will revolutionize everything, or destroy it. Meanwhile, 70% of 2024's AI predictions already aged poorly. Here's what I've learned from telling clients "I don't think AI can do what you want": there's a crucial difference between humility and helplessness. One keeps you learning. The other leaves you paralyzed. In a world of confident hot takes, maybe honest uncertainty is the real competitive edge.
The Human in the Loop Isn't Overhead
A new study claims experienced developers are 19% slower with AI tools, while believing they're faster. Here's why that finding is both true and completely misleading. After years of working with LLMs, I've learned the difference between automation and augmentation isn't just semantic; it's the key to everything. The human in the loop isn't overhead. It's the only thing catching inevitable failures.
Prompt Engineering Is Just Communication (And That's the Point)
Prompt engineering isn't dying; it's just communication by another name. The same skills that help you explain complex ideas to colleagues work with LLMs: resolving ambiguity, providing context, validating understanding. The difference? No body language, no facial expressions. Just text. So the text becomes everything. And if you can't push back when a model confidently gives you the wrong answer, you're not using the tool; it's using you.
The Best Code I Wrote Was the Code I Deleted
Five hours with Claude trying to build testcontainer pooling for Rust. A deadpool implementation that saved nothing. 200 lines of daemon architecture. Then Claude offhandedly mentioned the reusable-containers feature it knew about all along. CI dropped from 7m30s to 5m30s. AI assistants follow your framing. Frame the problem wrong, and they'll efficiently help you build the wrong solution.
Why I Call It "Intelligence Augmentation," Not "Artificial Intelligence"
The term "artificial intelligence" is a lie. Not in the sense that these tools don't work. They obviously work. I use them every day. But the phrase itself creates expectations that don't match reality, and those false expectations lead to bad decisions, wasted resources, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what we're actually building. I started calling it "Intelligence Augmentation" instead. Not as a branding exercise or a hot take, but because that's what it actually is.
Almost Building a Production Microblog in One Weekend: The Receipts
Most people claim they built something with AI. Few show the receipts. Here's what it actually looks like to build a full-stack microblog with AI assistance, complete with git commits, test coverage, and honest reflections on what worked and what didn't.