AI

46 articles · all categories

Coding got easy with AI but the engineering remains. You have to know what to build, recognize when the machine is wrong, and design systems that work at scale. Here I share lessons from using AI in production.

Latest AI articles

August 2026

Agents change the math on big bang migrations

I just did a team's worth of work in 5 days. Honestly I am shook to the core of my 20 YoE

July 2026

Theory of constraints, AI, and code review

Feedback from an expert is how you learn taste. Your code doesn't matter until it's shipped.

June 2026

Using vibes to rewrite my blog

The death of engineering has been greatly exaggerated. You still need to know what you're doing.

May 2026

What you need to make an agent

I've been digging into agents for internal tooling and processes. Looking for how to scale without drowning in manual work. Here's what I found

Quick note on evals and putting AI in your resume

When candidates put AI on their resume, the key thing I try to find out is whether they used evals. How did you measure making improvements?

April 2026

AI now writes 97% of my code. Here's what I learned

Forget the bullshit tips and tricks, just talk to it.

March 2026

Software engineer interviews for the age of AI

Maybe AI will replace engineers, I don't know. Self-driving cars were just around the corner for 50 years. Until then we've got shit to do and engineers to hire.

February 2026

Users buy your service, not your code

You might enjoy this podcast episode. Sylvain and I talked about owning production in a world where AI writes the code.

GeLLMan amnesia

AI will automate every job except the ones I'm deeply familiar with

January 2026

A better way to end-to-end test your webapp

End-to-end tests are the best way to test your webapp, but they're flaky and annoying to write. I'm trying a new agentic approach that fixes the issue.

November 2025

AI fills my day with busywork

Remember when AI was gonna take our jobs? I've never felt busier. The more I get done, the more there is to do.

July 2025

Cursor background agents in Slack changed my workflow

a couple weeks ago Cursor launched a Slack integration and ... wow. First time I can say AI *changed* my workflow

April 2025

re: The Industrialization of IT

I guess if AI is what it takes to finally get people to care about architecture and team structure then mission accomplished?

March 2025

AI writes good tests, actually

I've been using AI to write tests and it works surprisingly well! Here's how.

January 2025

Coaching AI to write your code

Working with AI is here and it's skill. Just like google-fu became important in the mid 2000's. A few things I've learned.

October 2024

Yes, AI will "take" your job. No, you won't mind

Is the job to get things done or to memorize trivia and solve cute coding puzzles?

June 2024

Using AI to spark connections at a conference

We built an AI algorithm to help you find interesting people to talk to at a conference. And make sure it's not awkward

May 2024

Why you shouldn't use AI to write your tests

If you derive tests from your implementation, you can't apply the Beyonce rule. What if the code is wrong and that wasn't the programmer's intent? We'll never know. The bug now exists in both places.

March 2024

How to start playing with generative AI

Generative AI is entering the early adopters phase of Moore's technology cycle. Lots of people have been asking me for the quickest and cheapest way to get started.

January 2024

How I Added a Related Articles Feature on Swizec.com Using GPT-4 Embeddings

Making 15 years of blog archives easier to navigate with AI and cosine similarity to build a related articles featur

October 2023

I tried generative AI on lots of data and we're not quite there yet

Lessons learned from running GPT-4 on lots of data using the same task.

AI Engineer Summit report

AI is the easy part of the equation. The real game changers in #AIEngineering are mastering data engineering, handling non-deterministic outputs, and nailing product development.

September 2023

Similarity search with pgvector and Supabase

Explore the power of pgvector and Supabase for efficient similarity search in this comprehensive guide. Keep vector data next to your business data for efficient queries and less overhead.

August 2023

Finding modules in a Big Ball of Mud with ChatGPT

Detangling a Big Ball of Mud is hard. You have to find domain boundaries where none exist. Looks like AI can help 🤩

Programming in Markdown

What if you could focus on the fun _engineering_ part of your job, not on coding? You can!

May 2023

How I turned 15 years of writing into a chatbot

What do you do with 15 years of your writing history when LLMs hit the scene? A chatbot!

Eight things to know about LLMs

eightthings.pdf is the best paper I've read on what's going on in AI right now and why everyone is excited. Here's my summary.

April 2023

I went to "AI Woodstock" and wow

"AI Woodstock" was a HuggingFace meetup showcasing groundbreaking AI projects and innovations. Here are some of my favs.

March 2023

The programming tutorial SEO industry is dead

20 years ago greybeards laughed at us for Googling. Now they laugh when we ask ChatGPT. But the leverage is 🚀

Build semantic search in an afternoon? Yep 🤯

Learn how to build a powerful semantic search engine in just 2 hours with the OpenAI API.