Over the past few months, the way software engineers talk about AI has started to change. I hear it in Slack threads at work and conversations with other developers. I read it more and more in other developers' blog posts. For a while, the conversation was only polarized. Some were convinced, and some still are, that large language models will replace programmers entirely. Others dismiss the hype. Recently the tone feels more practical, even among skeptics.
Glyph, who has written critically about LLMs, recently published a post asking What Is Code Review For? He's so spot-on about code review, btw – go read that post! – but then drops a surprise. The post is actually about LLMs!
He writes:
Sigh. I’m as disappointed as you are, but there are no two ways about it: LLM code generators are everywhere now, and we need to talk about how to deal with them.
I find my own point of view similar to Glyph's:
My own personal preference would be to eschew their use entirely, but in the spirit of harm reduction, if you’re going to use LLMs to generate code, you need to remember the ways in which LLMs are not like human beings.
That's kind of where I am. I have my own qualms about this. Anyone paying attention probably should. These systems raise real questions about what it means to write code, how engineers develop skill, and what our work might look like a decade from now. Never mind that the people most pushing this stuff are just creeps.
But still, I’m pragmatic. If these tools are going to be part of our future, then the responsible thing to do is to understand them, and understand well enough, that we can decide how best to ethically and humanely incorporate this technology into our lives.
I had this thought while trying to make sense of all the week’s news. Recent stories about the chaos of business and the greed of tech are an almost weekly feature these days. It's so exhausting. That thought I had: when did humanism go out of fashion?
Which is also to say: how did I end up here?
I never imagined a life for myself in tech and business. It was an accident, the kind of accident born from a conflagration of circumstances. One thing leads to another, then consumes your life, and here you are.
As a kid, I thought I’d write or draw comic books. I was a little artsy nerd. Then I found music, and the world opened for me, both literally and figuratively. I left home to be a touring musician. After a few years of that, I started to split time between touring and going to school for an English degree. College brought me back around to writing. I’d like to think I started to take writing seriously. I imagined then that I would write literary fiction and be a teacher. Maybe even a professor.
During that time, I took a geography class to satisfy some core curriculum requirement. The geography professor was excited by the early web, and for a couple weeks, we learned to build web sites by hand to host our class projects. I was hooked on web development. I imagined using the web as a means to share my writing. I was one of those naive 90s web enthusiasts. I saw the web as a tool in the hands of artists, professors, and writers. It was more text than technology for me.
I started to grad school, while also doing more and more on the web. I was an older student, already married a decade at that point, and my wife and I were ready to have children. I better get a real job, I thought, and after a year of teaching high school English, I took my first technical job at Auburn University Libraries.
The web has been good to me. I really shouldn’t complain.
Liberal arts degrees, like an English degree, spend a lot of time on the early Renaissance and the beginnings of humanism. It’s that moment in time when modern, rational thought took hold. You can draw a straight line from the Renaissance to classical liberalism, from rational thought to modern science, from humanism to democracy.
It makes sense to focus on it. We are who we are today because of humanism.
You cannot, however, truly understand humanism without understanding the context into which it was born. It seems simplistic today, but back then, it was religion versus reason. Religion granted authority to kings. It forced servitude. You didn’t matter. The church mattered. Land mattered. Your relationship to the land as nobility or peasant mattered.
Humanism came along and said everyone mattered because of individual worth and agency. It wasn’t God who gave you meaning. It was your own existence. It was a radical idea, and though modern churches still denounce humanism, especially in evangelical circles, most religious folks — at least here in the western world — recognize individual liberty and personal autonomy as basic human rights.
That’s humanism.
When I say I never thought I’d build a life for myself in tech and business, I mean that it wasn't even imaginable to me. I grew up splitting time between two households. My parents were divorced. In my dad’s house, it was the Wall Street Journal over breakfast. In my mom’s, it was tears of regret over coffee and a cigarette.
I never wanted much to do with either approach, largely because both seemed hollow. Business felt like a stuffy, greedy endeavor. Those tears of regret for my mom — they were born in religious superstition.
Religion and business were things best avoided at all costs.
I had to attend Christian school from ages 10-14 years old. It was oppressive and insulting. A pastor who was also my teacher at school told me I would never be a real man because I lived alone with my mom. The pastor didn't know, or couldn't be bothered to learn, that I spent Christmases and summers with my dad. People select facts that fit the narratives they want to tell, both then and now.
I have this vivid memory from my days in Christian school. I don’t remember the exact age, but I was young. I’m guessing elementary school aged.
I took a trip to Disney with my grandparents on my dad’s side. They were the best, the one part of my family that seemed normal and loving. I was excited about this trip and talked about it at school. I’ve always been a talker, always loved a good story. Then, the first Sunday after sharing my excitement at school, the pastor — the same one who said I would never be a man — preached on the evils of Disney and how good Christians would boycott that filth.
Boycotts are the modern age’s religious sacrament, a way to advertise one’s devotion via the most consumer-friendly means possible. I grew up with boycotts. I also see boycotts regularly employed by my circle of liberal, technological friends. Don't drive a Tesla; Elon is evil! AI, the end of humanity! And, of course. Social media is the cause of all that ails society!
It’s funny how there isn’t much daylight between the religious fundamentalists I grew up with and the techno-fundamentalists who make up my professional circle. Fundamentalism is convenient. It’s a way to draw a line in the sand. Us versus them. Heathen versus religious. Owner versus employee.
I guess the path I’ve taken has made it less clean and easy for me. I think of myself as a person of faith, at least in the "substance of things hoped for" sense, but I still see the harm organized religion causes. I’m an intellect and welcome deep, thoughtful engagement with life, but I don’t feel trapped in my mind. I’m a creative person, I hope an artist even, but I earn my living from a mostly boring, corporate job. I'm equal parts writer and web developer.
I’m an individual, all messy and complicated and hard to pin down, and that’s ok. That’s how it should be. We need more of that. More individualism, less dogma. More learning and understanding. More celebration of what makes us unique as human beings. If we had more of that, there'd be less corproate greed, less desire to see humanity replaced by computers. That’s what humanism taught me. So more of that please, and more Disney vacations, too.
Yesterday morning, over coffee, I was reading the latest Benedict Evans newsletter. In the section "Principles cost money," Ben quoted from advertising legend Bill Bernbach:
The ad industry guru Bill Bernbach said “it’s not a principle until it costs you money”. I left Twitter two years ago. It probably cost me money.
Tim Cook has spent a decade or two talking about principles and ‘fundamental human rights rights’ and putting rainbow flags and ‘allyship’ on Apple surfaces, and then he goes to watch a movie at the White House, and says nothing.
“It’s only a principle if it costs you money”
This struck me profoundly and deeply. I've been feeling the collision of my principles and my own relationship to tech, to politics, to culture for at least the last year.
I think seriously about returning to Linux, to get out of the Apple ecosystem, but I go back to my Mac after a month. It's hard. Well no, not hard. Inconvenient. I miss the apps I love. I miss the ease with which my digital life carries with me across devices, anchored and mobile, all at once.
I think about leaving social media entirely – to be clear, I'm not that active now – but then FOMO takes over. sigh. That FOMO. It's a force, invisible and centrifugal, like that black hole at the center of our galaxy. You don't realize it's there, but you're trapped in orbit around it.
Then, there are all the other things I mentally charge toward and then back flip away from.
I should retire from tech, build a business for myself. No, I can still make a 10 year run somewhere.
Writing, that's all I've ever wanted to do. No, I've been a developer so long, that's what I really am.
Stop using gen AI, it's sleazy. But this comic I made with the help of AI, it's kind of cool!
Today, I realized. It's the cost that keeps me trapped in this spin of indecision. It's the cost, the loss, that I want to avoid. Maybe not money, but it's something. Loss of pride, that fear of looking silly or dumb. Loss of respect, of getting found out for the true lack of depth of understanding and commitment I carry with me. Failure, that true loss, the true cost you might pay for trying to be more than you are.
In our modern world, money is the surest test of success. It's the thing Benedict Evans knows most well. He is primarily devoted to investments and business, and so, it's the framework that makes things make sense to him. But loss of any sort, it's the thing we all most want to avoid. Loss is the real cost, and if your principles don't carry with them the risk of true, fundamental loss, they must not be principles at all.
The new year is here, and I'm naturally in a reflective mood. What a year 2025 was for me. I changed jobs, saw my youngest graduate and start college, moved twice, and so much more. I expect 2026 to be less chaotic and more focused. At least that’s what I’m hoping for.
I've never been one for New Year's resolutions. I don't like the idea of making plans once and executing on them. I'm more of a be in the moment and adjust as you go kind of person. But even with that, I can't help but look ahead and think about what I'd like to get done this year.
To say I'm grateful for this job is an understatement. My prior two roles didn't work out as I had hoped. I was starting to get a bit down about my ability to land something that could be a long-term role for me. CNN came along at the perfect time. I've now got a role where I enjoy the work I do, it's a good technical fit for me and my expertise, and I've got great colleagues to share the journey with. I want to maintain that, so any plans I have around work are to be consistent in my role and try to grow within it.
We're doing more with Rust and edge compute, so I want to really learn Rust well this year. I've dabbled before, and I know enough Rust to be dangerous. I want to grow my technical expertise there. I also want to re-up my connection to Python and the Python community. I'm thinking of going to PyCon this year. For all my experience in Python and its open source community, I've never been to a PyCon. I hope to change that this year. I'm thinking about re:Invent this year too. AWS is a mainstay in my toolkit, both personally and at work, and I'd like to be more involved in re:Invent, even if it's the end of the year before we get there.
Outside of work, I'd like to spend more time with the things that help me feel more present.
One of those is travel with my wife. We're empty nesters now, and we've been talking about taking more weekend getaways. It feels cliche to say it, but it's true – my wife Wendy really is my best friend. We enjoy each other's company, and we love travel. I'm excited about visiting nice locales within a day trip of Atlanta. I hope to literally get away more as often as we can.
I also want to find some opportunities to play more of the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game with friends or other local Atlanta players. I love superheros, comics, and playing games with friends. MMRPG combines all those. I took up the game a little over a year and played a few times last year. I'd like to really lean in this year and play more, especially in person with others in Atlanta.
So 2026, here we go. Onward and upward. More focus. More living in the present. And hopefully I'll do a little better at sharing updates on all that here on my blog.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Cannot put this down or say enough good things about how I’m enjoying this book.
Catching up on a bunch of tech news pieces and blog posts I marked in Tapestry.
Watching
Latest episode of Pluribus — I can’t say enough good things about this show.
Binging Outlander with my wife. We’re currently starting on Season 4.
And speaking of Outlander…
We’re going to the GA Renaissance Festival on Saturday. My daughter loves it, and my wife and I are going to check it out. I’m going in Scottish Highland attire.
My family is giving me no end of grief suddenly getting in touch with my Scottish heritage since watching Outlander. But it’s a fun escape this weekend, and feels overdue with the week behind.
I’m thinking a lot about writing lately. I also spend a lot of my time working on technology. There’s actually a tension there. It might not be obvious, but it’s there. Writing is about slowing down, savoring the language. Every. Single. Word. Technology is about speeding things up, about doing more with less. The oft talked about, and (depending on your perspective) dreaded: productivity.
I was out walking earlier this week, here in Atlanta, maybe headed into work, maybe out for exercise. I was on this part of a street near my home where the trees dotted both sides of the road as it stretched out toward the horizon. High-rise apartments and corporate offices stood off in the distance, reaching into the clear, blue sky. People were walking by, listening to music on their iPhones. The AirPods were the give away. A lone Uber delivery robot was creeping up the sidewalk across from me, and I thought, “Wow, I’m living in the present and the future, all at the same time.”
That’s writing and technology. One takes us into the future, the other makes us present. The world is a little slanted toward technology at this point, and it shows. We're starting to wear under the weight of that singularity. There's a work around, though. It's being present and writing about it.
This is one of the coolest things I've seen in awhile. Jmail (via Daring Fireball). This whole thing is so clever, the way it mimics the look and feel of Gmail, including the supposed "AI Overview" explaining the site.
You are logged in as Jeffrey Epstein, jeevacation@gmail.com. These are real emails released by Congress. Explore by name, contribute to the starred list, search, or visit a random page.
A lot of less experienced and mediocre engineers likely think these tools are brilliant. They’re producing more code, feeling productive. The problem is they don’t see the quality problems they’re creating.
This is compared to the experienced coder.
They’ve lived with the consequences of bad code and learnt what good code looks like. When they look at AI-generated code, they see technical debt being created at scale. Without proper guidance, AI-generated code is pretty terrible. Their scepticism is rational.
Then, this paragraph really caught my eye:
I’ve regularly seen sceptical experienced engineers change their view once they’ve been shown how you can blend modern/XP practices with AI assisted coding.
I got caught up in this "modern/XP practices" phrase. I was like, "are we talking about Extreme Programming here?" I hadn't really thought about that in a while, or considered it "modern." So I went and looked it up to remind myself and found this Martin Fowler post on extreme programming from a decade ago.
XP was one of the first agile methods, indeed XP was the dominant agile method in the late 90s and early 00s before Scrum became dominant as the noughties passed.
For a lot of folks today, "scrum" is synonymous with "agile," for better and for worse. But there's a whole world of agile techniques out there. Falling down this XP rabbit hole was a good reminder of this for me.
So what, exactly, is XP? According to Fowler:
It popularized many practices that have since been widely used in software development, including: continuous integration, refactoring, TestDrivenDevelopment, and agile planning.
I would add "small, frequent changes" to that list too, and then other than TDD, just call this "good engineering" today.
To bring it back to AI, where we started above: AI will change how we write software. It's already doing that, but then, good engineering practices endure. Those good engineering practices can serve as a framework for understanding how best to use LLMs and other AI-based tools.
For a long time, I’ve let the ideal of the perfect writer’s life keep me from writing. Waiting on inspiration, a quiet room, or the perfect lighting. It has never worked out like that, which means I never find time to write.
I’ve stopped doing that. I’m just writing whenever now, wherever I can. In paper notebooks when I have 15 minutes at lunch. With a stylus on my Kindle while the TV plays in the background. I wrote this post in a notes app on my phone while lying in bed.
If you like Batman you should go read the new comic. It's a great jumping on point for lapsed comic readers. It's also everything I love about Batman – detective moments, great action pieces, a larger than life Gotham, and those villains. The art is so good. Issue #3 just released, so it's not too late to jump on this one. Go check it out now!
