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...
Grok is enabling mass sexual harassment on Twitter
Read it on seangoedecke.com Grok, xAI’s flagship image model, is now1 being widely used to generate nonconsensual lewd images of women on the internet. When...
Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
Read it on seangoedecke.com A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech...
You can't design software you don't work on
Read it on seangoedecke.com Only the engineers who work on a large software system can meaningfully participate in the design process. That’s because you...
Nobody knows how large software products work
Read it on seangoedecke.com Large, rapidly-moving tech companies are constantly operating in the “fog of war” about their own systems. Simple questions like...
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...
