When my good friends Deepti & Michael asked me to take pictures with their baby, Soleil, I was honored and at the same time nervous.
Photography for me is something that I have done as a pure hobby, but alas I did it!
For a week I was unstoppable. I'd describe what I wanted, the code appeared, everything worked. The pace was absurd. The feedback loop so tight it almost didn't feel real. Then it didn't. The code got messy. The system got harder to reason about.
I wrote recently about how AI turned me into a bad manager. This is the why behind it. And the way out. The cost of trying dropped to zero. That's the trap. There used to be a filter between idea and action. It was called effort. When building
All these AI tools make it feel like you can do anything. Not "ship a little faster" anything. More like "spawn 10 agents and have a swarm doing everything" anything. Debugging. Refactoring. Tests. Docs. Research. All of it, in parallel. And that power is real. But
One of the quieter struggles of leading engineering teams is that the time to practice the craft shrinks. You're in meetings. You're reviewing designs. You're hiring, mentoring, unblocking. When you get home, there's family. The long, uninterrupted sessions you had earlier in