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...
AI is good news for Australian and European software engineers
Read it on seangoedecke.com Right now the dominant programing model is something like “centaur chess”, where a skilled human is paired with a computer...
If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents
Read it on seangoedecke.com Using AI agents correctly is a process of reviewing code. If you’re good at reviewing code, you’ll be good at using tools like...
The whole point of OpenAI's Responses API is to help them hide reasoning traces
Read it on seangoedecke.com About six months ago, OpenAI released their Responses API, which replaced their previous /chat/completions API for inference. The...
'Make invalid states representable' considered harmful
Read it on seangoedecke.com One of the most controversial things I believe about good software design is that your code should be more flexible than your...
An unofficial FAQ for Stripe's new "Tempo" blockchain
Read it on seangoedecke.com Stripe just announced Tempo, a “L1 blockchain” for “stablecoin payments”. What does any of this mean? In 2021, I was interested...
Seeing like a software company
Read it on seangoedecke.com The big idea of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State can be expressed in three points: Modern organizations exert control by...
Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
Read it on seangoedecke.com When designing software systems, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. It’s surprising how far you can take this piece...
Finding the low-hanging fruit in tech companies
Read it on seangoedecke.com Suppose your job is to pick fruit in a giant orchard. The orchard covers several hills and valleys, and is big enough that you’d...
Everything I know about good API design
Read it on seangoedecke.com Most of what modern software engineers do1 involves APIs: public interfaces for communicating with a program, like this one from...
Don't feed me AI slop
Read it on seangoedecke.com In the early days of any new technology, the relevant social norms are still being workshopped. For mobile phones, that meant...
The famous "bottomless pit" AI greentext is fake
Read it on seangoedecke.com Many people believe1 this is the best piece of art or humour that AI has ever produced: This was generated three years ago by...
Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?
Read it on seangoedecke.com Reading research papers and articles about chain-of-thought reasoning1 makes me frustrated. There are many interesting questions...
What's the strongest model you can train on a laptop in five minutes?
Read it on seangoedecke.com What’s the strongest model I can train on my MacBook Pro in five minutes? I’ll give the answer upfront: the best 5-minute model I...
OpenAI's new open-source model is basically Phi-5
Read it on seangoedecke.com OpenAI just released its first ever open-source1 large language models, called gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. You can talk to them...
