Notes
Short pieces about the methodology and architecture decisions behind the AI systems I ship — specs, evals, multi-agent orchestration, LLM integration, and the discipline of directing coding agents.
June 9, 2026
Disrupted or dead — did you sell the thing AI now gives away?
More than 220 startups that once hit billion-dollar valuations are now worth less than half their peak, and a former DoorDash leader put it bluntly: workflow SaaS will be 'disrupted or dead' within a decade. At the same time, ~80% of the new 'AI wrapper' startups are expected to fail. Two opposite kinds of company are dying for the exact same reason — they sold the thing AI now provides. The survival test is one honest question, and it's worth asking about whatever you're building.
- business
- careers
June 9, 2026
Anthropic writes 80% of its code with AI. You're not Anthropic.
More than 80% of the code Anthropic merged to production in May was written by Claude. That number is about to be quoted in every 'developers are obsolete' argument and every pressure-to-keep-up meeting. So read it carefully, because it argues the opposite of what people think. It's the company with the best model, using that model on itself, reviewed by some of the best engineers alive. The percentage isn't the lesson. The thing that made 80% safe to ship is.
- methodology
- careers
June 8, 2026
You feel faster. You're probably slower.
A careful study put experienced developers on real tasks with AI tools. They expected to be 24% faster. They were actually 19% slower — and still believed AI had sped them up. Meanwhile teams ship 98% more pull requests but review time jumps 91% and company-wide delivery doesn't move. The AI productivity story has a hole in it, and it's not that AI is useless. It's that we sped up the one part that was never the bottleneck, and confused the feeling of speed for the real thing.
- methodology
- careers
June 7, 2026
“The AI did it” is the new way to dodge the blame
AI was named in roughly one in four US job cuts this spring, and even Sam Altman admits companies are blaming AI 'whether or not it really is about AI.' Analysts have a name for it: AI-washing. But the same move is quietly spreading into how we run agents — when something goes wrong, 'the agent decided' becomes the place responsibility goes to die. The machine can't hold accountability. A human always does. Here's why that matters more as you hand agents real decisions.
- business
- agents
- careers
June 6, 2026
Vibe coding is over. The hard part was never the demo.
Google now teaches vibe coding to a million-plus people in a free five-day course. When the thing you were proud of becomes a weekend class, that skill just stopped being your edge. But here's the part the headlines miss: vibe coding was always good at the easy 80% — the demo — and useless at the 20% that decides whether software survives. The skill that's actually scarce now isn't generating code. It's the judgment to know whether the code you got is any good.
- careers
- methodology
- ai-native
June 4, 2026
The bottom rung is gone
The data is in, and it's specific: AI ate the junior, not the senior. Companies aren't firing juniors — they've quietly stopped hiring them, because the tasks juniors did are exactly what agents now do. It looks efficient. But seniors aren't hired, they're grown — a senior is a junior who survived a few thousand bugs. Cut the juniors to save money now, and you starve the pipeline that makes the seniors you depend on. We're eating the seed corn.
- careers
- ai-native
- business