2026-08 - W3

AI coding without the vibes | peterbloem.nl

And, again, this applies to ourselves as well, even if we were lucky enough to get to develop this machinery before AI came along. Cognitive skills are like muscles: hard to gain, easy to lose. So what is the answer then? My best advice so far is that most things you do consist of two stages: doing and checking. You write some code, and you check it for bugs. You write some text and you fact-check it and proofread it.

Staff+ engineers must rebuild team culture - LeadDev

• AI-driven parallel work is eroding what makes a team: shared goals, interdependent work, and stability, leaving engineers shipping more while feeling more isolated.
• Culture forms through everyday collaboration. When AI replaces peer problem-solving, teams lose the shared experiences that reinforce norms.
• Staff+ engineers must deliberately rebuild what once happened automatically: celebrating good behavior, writing charters, and modeling collaboration.

33 Rules of Good Social Skills | Liam Rosen

Another list! I like lists.

The Citizen Developer | Massdriver

The frontend developer dropped into the backend. The backend developer poking at Terraform. I’m not a Node expert, so when I’m in Node, I’m a citizen. My co-founder is a citizen in Elixir. Step outside your lane and you’re one of them. … Maybe you’re a seasoned developer. You wrote every line by hand, developer. You wrote them with a language server, still a developer. You wrote them with autocomplete, still a developer. Copilot wrote half, sure, still counts. Claude wrote all of it, but you specified every behavior and caught its bugs. Where in that sequence did you stop being a developer? Nobody can answer, because the question was never about the code. So what do the SDR and the senior developer actually share? They’re both looking at some value the business needs, deciding it should be automatable and interactable through some interface, and willing it into existence. That’s the whole job. One of them has more practice. There’s a gradient between the expert and the citizen. We drew the boundary because it paid better.

Being a staff engineer at Stripe

The challenge here, then, is not executing these tasks in parallel per say, but actually managing all the actual agents doing these things. And making sure they are producing high-quality work. … It’s demanding, sometimes chaotic, and there are definitely weeks where I look at everything happening around me and wonder how the f*** I’m supposed to keep up. The bar is high, the pace is fast, and AI somehow made things easier and raised expectations at the same time.

Mmmh lots of generic stuff. But I feel like the author is “praising” being overworked…

Using Agents is literally engineering management | Jack Danger

Is it though?

Huzzah - A new experimental way to code with AI

The author is suggesting using pseudo-code instead of using English. Quite an interesting approach. Maybe I should experiment this way, by creating the interfaces, signatures, tests, use pseudo code in the comments, etc… and make the AI fill the blank.

I’m becoming AI-blind - Rafal Cymerys

I feel like I’ve been “pre-trained” on all the AI-generated LinkedIn posts, emails and websites that are full of text but empty on meaning. My brain learned to quickly spot signs of AI-generated content, at least the content generated with low effort, and it now ignores it and moves on without thinking much about it.

I’ve heard some people comparing it to “banner blindness”. It’s not surprising. With the amount of content being pushed at us, filtering it out is how we need to stay sane.

What’s fascinating to me, is that the same AI that was supposed to make me more productive, is what’s now slowing me down in an unexpected way.

Me too. That reminds me of the Fragments from Martin Fowler about having visceral reaction when reading AI-generated content.