I’m going to say something that might sound reckless: In 2026, “Human-in-the-Loop” may become the new “Red Flag Act.” In 1865, the UK required a man to walk 60 yards ahead of every automobile, waving a red flag to warn pedestrians. It wasn’t about safety, it was about comfort. It made the new technology legible to our intuition. And it may have held back the British car industry back for 30 years. ...
2025 was supposed to be the year of AI agents. Most faded into slideware. Coding agents are the exception. Here’s how I actually use them.
Originally written in June 2025. This is a more detailed version of a talk from around the same time. Everyone keeps saying “AI is changing software engineering.” Depending on who you listen to, that means either: “Developers are finally 10x more productive,” or “Developers are finally 0x employed.” Reality, as usual, is less dramatic and more interesting. A normal day for most engineers in 2025 looks something like this: You open your IDE. You have a TypeScript backend, or a Java microservice, or a Python data pipeline. There is an issue tracker, a CI pipeline, some dashboards that may or may not be lying to you. Someone on the team is arguing about naming and someone else is quietly fighting with YAML. ...