Programming (with AI agents) as theory building
Read it on seangoedecke.com Back in 1985, computer scientist Peter Naur wrote “Programming as Theory Building”. According to Naur - and I agree with him -...
Working on products people hate
Read it on seangoedecke.com I’ve worked on a lot of unpopular products. At Zendesk I built large parts of an app marketplace that was too useful to get rid...
Engineers do get promoted for writing simple code
Read it on seangoedecke.com It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security....
Big tech engineers need big egos
Read it on seangoedecke.com It’s a common position among software engineers that big egos have no place in tech1. This is understandable - we’ve all worked...
I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
Read it on seangoedecke.com In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who...
Giving LLMs a personality is just good engineering
Read it on seangoedecke.com AI skeptics often argue that current AI systems shouldn’t be so human-like. The idea - most recently expressed in this opinion...
What's so hard about continuous learning?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Why can’t models continue to get smarter after they’re deployed? If you hire a human employee, they will grow more familiar with...
Insider amnesia
Read it on seangoedecke.com Speculation about what’s really going on inside a tech company is almost always wrong. When some problem with your company is...
LLM-generated skills work, if you generate them afterwards
Read it on seangoedecke.com LLM “skills” are a short explanatory prompt for a particular task, typically bundled with helper scripts. A recent paper showed...
Two different tricks for fast LLM inference
Read it on seangoedecke.com Anthropic and OpenAI both recently announced “fast mode”: a way to interact with their best coding model at significantly higher...
On screwing up
Read it on seangoedecke.com The most shameful thing I did in the workplace was lie to a colleague. It was about ten years ago, I was a fresh-faced intern,...
Large tech companies don't need heroes
Read it on seangoedecke.com Large tech companies operate via systems. What that means is that the main outcomes - up to and including the overall success or...
Getting the main thing right
Read it on seangoedecke.com When you’re running a project in a tech company, understanding that your main job is to ship the project goes a surprisingly long...
How does AI impact skill formation?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Two days ago, the Anthropic Fellows program released a paper called How AI Impacts Skill Formation. Like other papers on AI...
You have to know how to drive the car
Read it on seangoedecke.com There are lots of different ways to be a software engineer. You can grind out code for twelve hours a day to make the world a...
How I estimate work as a staff software engineer
Read it on seangoedecke.com There’s a kind of polite fiction at the heart of the software industry. It goes something like this: Estimating how long software...
I'm addicted to being useful
Read it on seangoedecke.com When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to...
Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers
Read it on seangoedecke.com Two recently-hyped developments in AI engineering have been Geoff Huntley’s “Ralph Wiggum loop” and Steve Yegge’s “Gas Town”....
The Dictator's Handbook and the politics of technical competence
Read it on seangoedecke.com The Dictator’s Handbook is an ambitious book. In the introduction, its authors Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith cast...
2025 was an excellent year for this blog
Read it on seangoedecke.com In 2025, I published 141 posts, 33 of which made it to the front page of Hacker News or similar aggregators. I definitely wrote...
