Replace the Trivial, Augment the Difficult
A rule in the code-review engine I built caught an idiom I've been writing for years and can no longer see. That's the small half.
Tagged developer-skill
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You Can't Save a Layout You Don't Own
The request was: let me arrange these panes how I like, give the arrangement a name, and hand it back to me tomorrow on a different laptop.
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Fluent in a Dead Idiom
A newer engineer left a note on my pull request: this array should be readonly. He was right.
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Where the Reps Come From
Advice to keep reading assumes you built the judgment first. If AI writes the first draft, the cohort coming up is asked to keep what it never built.
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Familiarity Isn't Trust
I caught myself telling an AI, "you're starting to sound like me." My cadence, my hedges, the figures I reach for — it had picked them up and was handing them…
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Confidently Wrong
A model handed me a clean answer once. Well structured, sure of itself, and wrong — and nothing in how it was written gave that away.
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Thinking at the Speed of Code
A while back, I stopped reading the AI's end-of-task summaries and started watching the diffs. They came through faster than I could have typed them.
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Give Away the Writing, Keep the Reading
Linus Torvalds vibe-coded the visualizer and hand-wrote the audio math. One repository, the whole argument — writing code was never the scarce skill.
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The Productivity Mirage
Sixteen experienced developers finished 19% slower with AI and believed they were 20% faster. The feeling of a fast session tracks fluency, not distance.
