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Spec-driven development promises control through living, iterative specifications. But without clear workflows and better tooling, teams keep falling into the same big-design-upfront trap that agile was invented to escape. A practitioner’s honest take on the gap between SDD’s vision and its current reality.
Spec-Driven Development Isn’t Waterfall — But It Keeps Ending Up ThereEvery clean code practice we follow was invented to solve a human problem. But what happens when humans are no longer the primary audience of source code? A senior developer’s honest reckoning with AI-driven development and what it means for the craft.
Clean Code Is Dead (And I Hate That I Agree)The most valuable developer skill right now isn't writing more code faster. It's learning unfamiliar codebases, building context that guides decisions, planning strategic approaches to problems, and shipping production code…
You Think, AI Executes: The Skills That Actually MatterNew research shows experienced developers are 19% slower with AI tools — but feel 20% faster. I walk through three major studies that prove AI isn’t making us faster, and share the confidence boundary framework for knowing what to delegate and what to keep.
I’ve been producing bad code (because of AI)I once interviewed a senior software engineer. Almost 10 years of experience. Proven track record of delivery. Solid industry knowledge. The kind of person you’d want on your team without…
How We Made It Nearly Impossible to Become a DeveloperResearch shows AI makes experienced developers 19% slower, reduces code comprehension by 17%, and trust in AI output is declining. Yet the pressure to be dramatically more productive with AI keeps growing. Here is what the data actually says and how to find your confidence boundary.
The AI Productivity Lie Nobody Wants to AdmitWorking code without architecture predictably collapses. Learn why AI amplifies architectural chaos, how accidental architecture leads to rewrites, and what hexagonal architecture can do to fix it — with practical steps you can take this week.
Your Code Works. Your Architecture Doesn’t.A few weeks ago, I wrote about The Review Bottleneck — how AI-generated code comes with so much confident explanation that we’ve stopped actually reviewing it. We’re not doing more…
AI Code Reviews Are Backwards (Do This Instead)How a simple 50-line notification system spiraled into architectural chaos in 20 weeks—and why AI coding tools now make this descent 10x faster. A cautionary tale every developer will recognize.
A Tale of Accidental Architecture: How 50 Lines Became A Black Friday DisasterSoftware estimation is broken in the AI era. Developers swing between wildly optimistic and pessimistic estimates as AI tools shatter old calibration models. Learn why everyone’s estimates are slipping, what’s really happening behind the scenes, and practical strategies to rebuild estimation skills for AI-augmented development.
Nobody Knows How to Estimate Software Anymore (And It’s Not Your Fault)