If you only read one thingOn The Death of Daydreaming (19 minute read) âCan you remember the last time you daydreamed? Or coped with boredom without reaching for your phone?â Well can you? I think you need to do nothing, NOTHING, to get new creative insights. But it is so hard to do nothing. One trick when I wrote my book, I do not need to write, but Iâm also not allowed to do anything else. The monkey brain will write. Sitting in our garden, daydreaming.. âI should mow the lawnâ. âAs a member of Generation X, I took boredom for granted.â GenX myself (yes THAT old!) Trying hard to relearn boredom. Removed all games from my phone. Got great ideas. Or not! âToday you rarely see the word âidleâ Not sure how often as CTO I was asked why developers donât type! FASTER! Didnât we hire them to code? Good ideas? Pah. Type faster! And donât idle around. This company is built on mindless actionism, so fall in line. Next time you want to jump into action, instead idle around. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming
Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekGetting things âdoneâ in large tech companies (4 minute read) âWhat does it mean to get things done in large companies? Most importantly, it means finishing things. [..] Second, it means delivering the kind of things that are legible to the decision-makers at the company: i.e. visible to your manager, plus 1-3 skip levelsâ As Iâm always saying, solve problems for your manager (theirs, not yours!), deliver what you promise and make sure the boss of your boss knows about it (because your boss can give you more salary, but their boss can promote you significantly) - if you want to have a career. Not that you have to. https://www.seangoedecke.com/getting-things-done/ The End of Programming (9 minute read) The End of Programming. Whenever I say this, people laugh or get angry. But Iâm no longer alone, âProgramming will be obsolete. I believe the conventional idea of âwriting a programâ is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed.â Be prepared. https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/the-end-of-programming/ AI is not software. It runs on hardware, but this is where it ends. Itâs built differently, it is run differently. The article says much the same, but calls it âSoftware 2.0â. Iâd call it âAIâ. The astonishing thing, the article is from 2017. https://karpathy.medium.com/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 Semantic Unit Testing (15 minute read) Semantic Unit Testing in this context means LLM reading the source code and the comments and checking for consistency. The function name (or the documentation) is multiply and the function returns a+b -> the AI flags the code. Good idea, would need to check it out with real code (You should!). Generally with AI I have the feeling requirements as explicit texts become more important for checking and generating code. Perhaps this is now the time for Design by Contract at last? https://www.alexmolas.com/2025/04/09/semantic-unit-testing.html Duolingoâs Is AI First (13 minute read) Duolingo is now AI first, baby! Take that! But the CEO makes sure, that their company âwill remain a company that cares deeply about its employeesâ. I also have a bridge to sell. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7322560534824865792/ Accountability Sinks (24 minute read) Organisations tend to structure themselves so no one is accountable (âCreates Accountability Sinksâ.) I once worked in a company that had the bad habit of inviting every manager to every meeting, as a way to not be accountable for anything (âYou could have said something!â). As an engineering manager, 1. make people accountable (âI expect you..â) 2. hold people accountable (âI want you to.. until.. or..â). One by one you create a culture of accountability (hard work!). Long, good read. https://250bpm.substack.com/p/accountability-sinks The blissful zen of a good side project (7 minute read) âIt doesnât matter what the project is; it matters that it is.â If you canât do things you love at work (but you should!) or create at your job because youâre a manager (but you should!), there is bliss in side projects. Too often I hear managers say âIâm no longer coding.â - saaaaaad. âWhatever the reason: I realize now Iâve let it push my consumption-to-creation ratio wildly out of balance.â Not sure though if AI and Claude Code make side projects better (because easier), or worse (because youâre not coding). https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/the-blissful-zen-of-a-good-side-project Everything we announced at our first-ever LlamaCon (21 minute read) So now there are AI LLM conferences, like there were Rails or React conferences before. Is this the change? Is this the first sign for the replacement of frameworks? Or is it a fluke, something companies try out and that will go away? https://ai.meta.com/blog/llamacon-llama-news/ Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists (8 minute read) ââAI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation,â the authors state in their paper.â I once called this the productivity YoYo in a keynote talk. We gain productivity by one tool, and then spend our time on other things, that fill that productivity up - because we now can. Up to the level of acceptance again. This brought us SPA, and native mobile and Scrum meetings. We know how to waste the productivity gains we got in the past, and we sure know now how to do this. So as CTO, what to do? Also with AI, you need to think bigger than before. People are faster, if you do not react with all of your procesess and a reorg, people will just idle around (Great, see above, but no productivity gains). Give people more work (Iâm quite sure that the companies in the paper didnât give people more work), or let half of the people work on new things (best, but you already run out of great ideas as a company and work on smallish things), or let half of the people go. Otherwise they will fill the productivity gains with other things #YoYoEffect. https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/29/generative_ai_no_effect_jobs_wages/ Cursor, Windsurf, and Developer Slot Machines (3 minute read) About using different AI IDEs. What an idea! âWith everything being built on VS Code, it feels like Iâm just moving onto the next slot machine in the same casino. When Windsurf stops spitting out in good code, Iâll probably jump back over to Cursor. [..] Windsurf, Cursor, and all the other VS Code forks can open the same workspace files, and you can drag tabs between each of themâ https://prototypr.io/note/vibe-coding-cursor-windsurf-slot-machine The One-Person Framework in practice (10 minute read) Iâm a huge fan of one-person frameworks (HTMX/Go/Echo in my case) like Rails. You get things done that way. The article is one coder getting to $1M/ARR. Donât use technologies that you donât need (looking at you, Kafka!) and youâll need fewer developers and achieve more. Use a one-person framework and make money. https://bramjetten.dev/articles/the-one-person-framework-in-practice Join the CTO newsletter! | |
