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AI is destroying my CS degree
I am a computer science student. I got a scholarship to study computer science and AI last year and I love it! It's something that I wanted to do since I was...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,747 posts.
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Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I have a spicily optimistic take: I think there's a huge opportunity for junior engineers.
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The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
An update to Brooks's Law in the age of AI.
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Why I Am a Programmer
There they sit, the preschooler class encircling their mentor, the substitute teacher.
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The Importance of Limitations for Creativity and Learning (2023)
The other day, my kids started messing around (at home) with an online document writing platform their school uses. They’d discovered a fun little easter egg. I watched them laugh and play with the feature - pushing its limits and ultimately crashing the browser.
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Move Slow and Fix Things (2024)
Growing up as a kid in rural Bavaria, I always …
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The reverts will continue until morale improves
Many readers will be aware that an unusually high number of features have been reverted from the PostgreSQL 19 branch after the beta period began. Having some reverts is not unusual, maybe one per cycle could be expected. But this time around, about 8 to 10 significant features, depending on how you count, have been…
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I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories
I’ve decided to archive the source code of my Ruby gems to make it clear that I’m no longer working on them; I’ve written this post to link from them in order to explain why.
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Personal software factories are a waste of time
Why the last thing you should spend time on is your own software factory.
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Someone behind the software
I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work.
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Microsoft Teams is a red flag
Teams looks free because it comes in the bundle. The people paying for that choice are the ones stuck using it every day.
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My old job feels distant now
I can hardly remember first experiencing ChatGPT. Its become so infused into my professional life, that going back to that first moment, or moments, is difficult. Instead a blur of a few moments. At some point, I realized it was a better Google. It was very similar to when Stackoverflow took off, and how Google search…
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Were software engineers blue-collar workers all along?
There’s a common idea among economists that you can broadly split employees into two categories. “White-collar” workers are typically people who work in offices doing service-based, knowledge-based, managerial, or administrative...
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AI is a tool and using it well takes skill
A response to Rich Hickey's "'AI' is Not a Tool": automation and tool use can coexist, and wielding an LLM well requires skill, feedback, and judgment.
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How to Build Wealth as a Career Person
There is a popular idea that substantial wealth belongs mainly to entrepreneurs. We celebrate founders, investors and business owners so loudly that a career person can begin to believe that employ…
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I paid people to try and follow my README
Developers suck at writing documentation. We like to say RTFM but often there ain't no FM to R. At best we have a half-arsed collection of notes, some obsolete tips, and a link to a desolate forum full of people asking the same questions again and again. That's no way to treat our users. I naïvely believe there's a…
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Build your own decision model
"System one" decision models are models that infer and respond with calibrated probabilities or every allowed answer. Consider your everyday language model, to get typed output from it (JSON), you may use Structured Output to constrain the output to guaranteed valid JSON. While model prefills the input in one pass,
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Programming Isn't Special
Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?
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CS240 AI Cheating Retrospective
Jeff Turkstra's personal website. Contains photographs, memoirs, TI-86 & TI-89 programs/games, quotes, MIDI's, SeaQuest images, links, and more!
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A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
A how-to manual for engineer-led discovery in software platforms
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Coding is not solved
Tell me you don’t understand software without literally using those words!!!
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First Principles Thinking
On first principles thinking, learning to work with agents, and setting experience aside long enough to see a problem clearly.
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Goodbye Google
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
AI forced me to abandon evidence-based best pedagogy practices, focus on oral and written exams, and redo most assignments. Here is what we did in 17-645...
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I don't want the details
Why reasonable explanations are one of the easiest ways to avoid changing anything.
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Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly
Having played both parts in the kabuki play that is employee-employer matchmaking, I feel the way we play it is a zero-sum game. I wish it were not so. When this post started life in 2024, as a wall of text chat message, it was brutal out there, on both sides of the software industry interview table. The ZIRP had…
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I am often wrong
[I shared this note with my team earlier this week, and am posting it here as well. I hope it is interesting or helpful for others working on building product in the age of AI.]
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The senior engineer death spiral
on proving yourself, burning out, and being a good teammate
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There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs 1 . They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked 2 . This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was often quite silly.