The Hard Part Was Never the Code. It Was the Theory.
Senko Rašić is right that “code was never the hard part” insults programmers. Peter Naur explained what it actually gets wrong, in 1985.
Writing, page 5 of 12
All 138 posts, newest first. The latest are on page 1, and the topic directory groups them by subject.
Phoenix Secrets: runtime.exs, Fly.io, and LLM Keys
The compile-time trap in config.exs, why System.fetch_env! should crash your boot, and how to actually wire Fly secrets and LLM keys through a Phoenix release.
The Office Mandate Is a Measurement Failure
Return-to-office mandates are what companies reach for when they can't measure output. Agents just destroyed the last proxies that were limping along.
Every Insane Codebase Was Once Rational
Architecture certainty isn't on the menu. Decide for the horizon you can see, three to six months, and know which doors only open one way.
Nobody Got Replaced. Agents Got Added.
McKinsey didn't swap 25,000 people for AI agents. What its CEO actually said is more useful to founders, and changes the question to ask before hiring.
What I Check When I Inherit a Vibe-Coded App
The consultant's playbook for taking over an undocumented AI-built app after the builder walks away: what to audit first, and how to price it.
Multi-Tenant AI SaaS in Phoenix: Isolation That Holds
Tenant isolation for AI SaaS in Phoenix: per-tenant API key tradeoffs, Ecto context scoping, and the pgvector bug that leaks one tenant into another.
Schlep Blindness Is the Only Moat Agents Can’t Cross
Paul Graham’s schlep blindness, updated for 2026: agents made the fun half of your product free to copy, so the tedious half is the only part left worth owning.
What Four Months of Embedded AI Engineering Ships
What a sixteen-week embedded AI engineering rotation ships, month by month, from the first merge to the handoff artifacts that let it end.
Estimating Client Work When Agents Do the Building
Agent-era velocity is bimodal: the same feature can take 20 minutes or 3 days. How I scope, bill, and talk to clients about it honestly.
The Career I Built on Work Nobody Wanted
A career built on the audits, migrations, and offshore coordination nobody volunteered for, because that work maps a company fastest.
Your Coding Agent Has No Reason to Write Good Code
Coding models are trained on a pass/fail test signal. Maintainability isn't graded, so it isn't learned, and no harness you build can fix that.