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The Test Suite That Lets You Move Fast

The Test Suite That Lets You Move Fast

You know the feeling. You're staring at a function someone wrote three years ago. It works—probably. It's called from fourteen places. The original author left the company. There are no comments, or worse, comments that lie. You need to change it. You're pretty

The Speed Asymmetry

The Speed Asymmetry

On April 28, 2025, at exactly 12:33:30, the Iberian Peninsula went dark. A cascading failure disconnected Spain and Portugal from the European electricity grid. Spain lost 15 gigawatts in five seconds—60% of its total power demand. Within hours: water treatment plants stopped pumping, hospitals switched to backup

Tamas as Teacher

Tamas as Teacher

You've noticed it by now. The heaviness that settles in around mid-December. The way mornings feel thicker, slower to start. How the body wants rest it hasn't earned by the usual metrics—more sleep, more stillness, more nothing. And probably: the quiet guilt that follows. The

The 19% Delusion

The 19% Delusion

Experienced developers using AI tools took 19% longer to complete tasks. They estimated they were 20% faster. That's not a rounding error. That's a 39-point gap between experience and reality. The METR study dropped this in 2025: a randomized controlled trial, actual time measurements, developers with

The Labor That Remains

The Labor That Remains

The judgment-execution loop — AI does the typing, you make thousands of decisions about what matters. The work didn't disappear; it condensed into pure judgment.

Vibe Engineering: The Labor That Remains

Vibe Engineering: The Labor That Remains

The agent wrote 9,200 tests. I made 9,200 decisions about whether they mattered. This is the ratio that nobody warned us about. When Emil Stenström built a production-grade HTML5 parser using AI assistance, the machine did the typing. He did something else—something continuous, invisible, exhausting in a

Becoming Fool and Elder Simultaneously

You're supposed to outgrow the fool. That's what every developmental model promises: climb the ladder, shed the immature versions of yourself, arrive at wisdom. Gibran says something different in his essay "How to Be Human," preserved and illuminated by Maria Popova at The Marginalian: