The silent AI war inside tech companies
Read it on seangoedecke.com I recently wrote an article for LeadDev about how software engineers are dealing with the AI hype in practice. Here’s my...
The case for regulating AI companions
Read it on seangoedecke.com In April, OpenAI screwed up by releasing a version of GPT-4o that was overly sycophantic. If you told it that Brian Cox was...
How to actually use Model Context Protocol
Read it on seangoedecke.com Everyone’s very excited about Model Context Protocol, or MCP for short. In a sentence, MCP is a universal protocol for exposing...
Practical notes on getting LLMs to generate new ideas
Read it on seangoedecke.com Large language models struggle to generate new ideas. To AI skeptics, this seems trivially true, since they believe LLMs can only...
Building a RTS where you issue orders to AI agents
Read it on seangoedecke.com I’ve always been interested by the third-act turn in Ender’s Game where the child strategists switch from directly controlling...
The three great virtues of an AI-assisted programmer
Read it on seangoedecke.com In 1991, Larry Wall famously wrote that the three great virtues of a programmer were “laziness, impatience, and hubris”. A...
METR's AI productivity study is really good
Read it on seangoedecke.com I complain a lot on this blog about AI studies. Given that, I ought to give credit when an AI study comes out that I think is...
Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs
Read it on seangoedecke.com I recently read a very good blog post by Halvar Flake titled “A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs”. Here’s a very brief summary:...
Mecha-Hitler, Grok, and why it's so hard to give LLMs the right personality
Read it on seangoedecke.com Recently, xAI’s Grok model made some very strange comments. In a now-deleted post, it suggested Adolf Hitler as the right person...
The more senior engineers get, the more results matter
Read it on seangoedecke.com In my experience, people tend to overrate how much moving up the org chart changes the fundamentals of the job. As a staff...
How I use LLMs to learn new subjects
Read it on seangoedecke.com If you want to learn about a new subject in 2025, one of the best ways to do it is to ask a strong language model. The reason...
Building tiny AI tools for developer productivity
Read it on seangoedecke.com The two current paradigms of AI app development are agentic coding (using an AI to help you write your ordinary line-of-business...
How to become passionate about delivering shareholder value
Read it on seangoedecke.com I am passionate about delivering shareholder value. It feels kind of embarrassing to admit, but it’s true1. I like all the things...
What happens when engineers work more than one job
Read it on seangoedecke.com There’s a news story going around about an engineer called Soham1 who was routinely “overemployed”: he maintained remote jobs at...
Continuous AI in software engineering
Read it on seangoedecke.com When I use AI in my software engineering job, I use it “on tap”: when I have a problem that I’d like to run past the LLM, I go...
I don't care if my manager writes code
Read it on seangoedecke.com I write a lot about how the post-2010s economic squeeze has made it harder to be a software engineer at a large tech company. But...
AI coding agents are already commoditized
Read it on seangoedecke.com All of a sudden, it’s the year of AI coding agents. Claude released Claude Code, OpenAI released their Codex agent, GitHub...
Pure and impure software engineering
Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers? Read it on seangoedecke.com Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights...
Everything I know about good system design
Read it on seangoedecke.com I see a lot of bad system design advice. One classic is the LinkedIn-optimized “bet you never heard of queues” style of post,...
What's going to happen to junior engineers?
I'm worried about the impact of AI on the market for juniors. Read it on seangoedecke.com In the 2010s, companies were hiring a lot of juniors. This was...
