Issues › Section
11 posts across all issues
Issue #811 · Sep 25, 2026
Dan Luu argues that acting as a brain-off "meat proxy" for an LLM can't pay off for an employee. While the LLM can't do the job alone, the result is bad software. Once it can, the company has no reason to keep the proxy.
Issue #811 · Sep 25, 2026
After an incident, asking why it happened tends to produce a reasonable story and no change. Michael Heap retells how an SVP cut off his explanation. He argues the useful question is what the team will change to make the same class of failure less likely.
Issue #811 · Sep 25, 2026
Engineers new to a senior role often take on an oversized project to prove themselves. They go quiet for weeks and spiral into overwork and burnout. Sunil Pai's fix is to drop a level for a while and do bugs and grunt work for teammates. That daily momentum rebuilds the trust that brings bigger work back.
Issue #810 · Sep 18, 2026
Clara Collier asks what happens if AI takes over economically necessary labor and life becomes "relational." She says we can already see the result in Versailles courtiers, 1980s upper-class Midwestern women and Boston's working-class West End. These groups drew no status from work. They turned clannish, conformist and absorbed in gossip. Collier argues that work's real gift is respect earned for what you do rather than who you know.
Issue #809 · Sep 11, 2026
A former nuclear and avionics controls engineer argues that companies using AI should build deliberate "manual gates" into their workflows. One example is debugging with the AI assistant switched off. The gates let junior engineers gain the skills they'll need when the automation fails.
Issue #808 · Sep 4, 2026
A one-page campaign site asks developers to switch off AI assistants one day a week and write code by hand. It cites studies linking LLM use to cognitive debt, weaker critical thinking and poorer skill formation. It argues that if AI's productivity gains are real, one day without it costs little.
Issue #807 · Aug 28, 2026
Lalit Maganti, who works on Google's Perfetto tracing tool, says staff engineers find their best problems by absorbing the complaints around them. They wait until several complaints turn out to share one cause. Maganti then tests that shared cause before building, because a tidy pattern can still be wrong.
Issue #807 · Aug 28, 2026
Sean Goedecke argues that software engineers should never be genuinely angry at work. Anger usually comes from caring about the work. But colleagues start routing decisions around an angry engineer, so anger costs more influence than it wins.
Issue #805 · Aug 14, 2026
Designer Itay Dreyfus says caring too much about your own creative work stalls it. His fix is to treat personal projects with the distance you bring to client work. That distance is what finally lets him finish them.
Issue #805 · Aug 14, 2026
AI didn't create bad engineers. It removed their speed limit. Anyone can now generate tens of thousands of lines a day. Understanding and reviewing a change is as slow as ever. The author argues this pulls pay apart. The few people who know what the system does get paid more. The rest get priced out.
Issue #805 · Aug 14, 2026
The author says knowledge workers' despair goes deeper than money. AI hands their already abstract work to agents. That exposes "Workism", the habit of treating a career as the source of meaning, as an illusion. Companies that lose this talent may not get it back. His remedy is to accept that most office work doesn't matter and to look for meaning in people and community.