AI detection tools cannot prove that text is AI-generated
Read it on seangoedecke.com The runaway success of generative AI has spawned a billion-dollar sub-industry of “AI detection tools”: tools that purport to...
How good engineers write bad code at big companies
Read it on seangoedecke.com Every couple of years somebody notices that large tech companies sometimes produce surprisingly sloppy code. If you haven’t...
Becoming unblockable
Read it on seangoedecke.com With enough careful effort, it’s possible to become unblockable. In other words, you can put yourself in a position where you’re...
Why it takes months to tell if new AI models are good
Read it on seangoedecke.com Nobody knows how to tell if current-generation models are any good. When GPT-5 launched, the overall mood was very negative, and...
Only three kinds of AI products actually work
Read it on seangoedecke.com The very first LLM-based product, ChatGPT, was just1 the ability to talk with the model itself: in other words, a pure chatbot....
Writing for AIs is a good way to reach more humans
Read it on seangoedecke.com There’s an idea going around right now about “writing for AIs”: writing as if your primary audience is not human readers, but the...
To get better at technical writing, lower your expectations
Read it on seangoedecke.com Technical writing is a big part of a software engineer’s job. This is more true the more senior you get. In the limit case, a...
Is it worrying that 95% of AI enterprise projects fail?
Read it on seangoedecke.com In July of this year, MIT NANDA released a report called The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025. The report spends most...
Why do AI models use so many em-dashes?
Read it on seangoedecke.com If you asked most people to name a defining feature of AI-generated writing, they’d probably say the em-dash — like this....
Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the last two years, code review has gotten much more important. Code is now easy to generate using LLMs, but it’s still just...
Should LLMs just treat text content as an image?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Several days ago, DeepSeek released a new OCR paper. OCR, or “optical character recognition”, is the process of converting an...
What have we learned about building agentic AI tools?
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the middle of 2025, agentic coding finally became a thing: first with the release of Claude Sonnet 4, the first “smart enough...
We are in the "gentleman scientist" era of AI research
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many scientific discoveries used to be made by amateurs. William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, was a composer and an organist....
How I provide technical clarity to non-technical leaders
Read it on seangoedecke.com My mission as a staff engineer is to provide technical clarity to the organization. Of course, I do other stuff too. I run...
GPT-5-Codex is a better AI researcher than me
Read it on seangoedecke.com In What’s the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five minutes? I tried my hand at answering a silly AI-research...
How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many software engineers are fatalistic about company politics. They believe that it’s pointless to get involved, because1:...
What is "good taste" in software engineering?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with...
AI coding agents rely too much on fallbacks
Read it on seangoedecke.com One frustrating pattern I’ve noticed in AI agents - at least in Claude Code, Codex and Copilot - is building automatic fallbacks....
Endless AI-generated Wikipedia
Read it on seangoedecke.com I built an infinite, AI-generated wiki. You can try it out at endlesswiki.com! Why build an AI-generated wiki? Large language...
What I learned building an AI-driven spaced repetition app
Read it on seangoedecke.com I spent the last couple of weeks building an AI-driven spaced repetition app. You can try it out here. Spaced repetition Like...