After 25+ years in software, I've seen my share of hype cycles. But agentic AI is different. It’s not just faster tools—it’s a shift in what software even is. 🧵 A guide for veteran engineering leaders on how to recalibrate:

⚡️What she is feeling is skill deflation shock. And it is real. But the conclusion most people jump to is wrong. 1. The uncomfortable truth The pain is not that AI learned her craft. The pain is that her craft was procedural mastery, not scarce judgment. High-end

Best summary of why companies/civilisations/systems decline:

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I

The bitter lesson for software engineers is that, in an economic system that prioritises shareholders over customers and employees, power and perception matter more than competence and reality.

We do not need universal basic income. We need universal basic meaning. Cash without purpose still breaks people. Purpose without cash is cruelty. What would a meaning first society give every citizen by default? Reply with one idea.

I went on a job interview for a Senior SWE role. They asked me about my experience with Kafka. I told them how in “Metamorphosis” someone can lose their worth in others’ eyes the moment they stop being useful. It’s a chilling reminder of how fragile our sense of belonging can

Pick your poison: https://t.co/tj1mnI3llo OR https://t.co/bFO4OqWQgS

My top learning for 2026: If you want to understand and predict a human system (workplace, community, political system etc), don't only look at it's goals and purpose, look at its incentives and constraints.

And - it only changes faster from here, and now it's coming for all careers. Us software folks probably have some useful coping skills that are going to need teaching...

I was born into a home with no personal computer, no internet, no cellphones. Not unusual for the late 70s. In my career lifespan in software I've seen my field go from "four characters is too many to store the year" to "Run these 10 documents through an AI on the other side of

All the great breakthroughs in science are, at their core, compression. They take a complex mess of observations and say, "it's all just this simple rule". Symbolic compression, specifically. Because the rule is always symbolic -- usually expressed as mathematical equations. If

Why do experts often not make great mentors or teachers? Surely if they understand it, they should be able to teach it? Can't they just decide to share their wisdom? Nope. They can't. If you do something often enough, at some point you develop enough intuition that relying on

yes

HigherGround, a legit South African non-profit, is raising funds for their therapeutic adventure holiday for people with disabilities - taking place in December ( https://t.co/fkybuf1NqR). Consider making a small donation - lots of small contributions will add up to massive

The digital intelligence paradox: The more generally intelligent the AI the more context and expertise required to use it. It’s the “paradox of choice” in digital form; the smarter the system, the more you must understand what you _actually_ want.

This aligns strongly with my experience building an agentic learning loop based system. Some helpful principles I’ve isolated so far: / Focus on agency and learning. Intelligence is an input to those. / Reason about digital intelligence and analog/real world/human/tacit

The bottleneck for deep skill isn't usually intelligence, but boredom tolerance. Learning has an activation energy: below a certain skill threshold, practice is tedious, but above it, it becomes a self-sustaining flow state. The entire battle is persisting until that transition.

Vibe coding gives you a running solution, not a working solution. The gap between those cannot be closed using vibe coding. That doesn't make vibe coding wrong or ill advised, but you are walking through a minefield (or sending others over one) if you don't come to terms with

Peak irony: @Grokipedia does not have a page for "vibe coding". (posted with the self awareness that I am bashing a v0.1 solution that will get better very quickly (but using it right now very much feels like I'm using something someone vibe coded))