Software engineer escapism: going back to reality I just read Have taken up farming and I can’t help but gaze into nothing and think about what it is about software that seems to give many people the same symptoms. Here are some of my thoughts and musings. Software does not exist I found software engineers are often creative people that love building things. I remember thinking gratefully about how lucky I am, as a software engineer, being able to take my whole ’lab’ in a backpack. A few kilos worth of electronics allows me to experiment with very nearly whatever I want, wherever I want. ...
The Developer Is Dead, Long Live the Designer
With the advent of coding agents and their improvement, developing software as we have been doing it is, at least in many fields, already going the way of the Dodo. But bear with me for a second while I try to explain why I think this is great for developers and I am not actually trying to doom-bait. It was never about just typing the code This is now cliché, but also the crux of the matter. A year into working on a side project like it’s my job, and having made wide use of AI coding agents, I can say I was surprised by the perspective shift this allowed for me. ...
Dabbling with coding agents? Remember Encapsulation
TLDR: AI aided software engineering offers productivity gains but also challenges Software Engineers to integrate stochastic AI-generated code while keeping projects maintainable. Reinterpreting the classic software engineering principle of encapsulation, defining robust, data-oriented module interfaces (fixed points) and rigorous unit tests (rules), we can treat the agent’s work as a controllable black box. This approach allows the agents to operate autonomously and by so doing offering the maximum viable benefits that will still see the human retain domain understanding and project control. ...