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...
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...
