Notes

There's a good Ask HN thread going: "What is the current trajectory of a senior engineer?" People are split. Some think we all become tech leads directing agents, some think the human value moves to testing, observability and building consensus, and a few think we're turkeys voting for Christmas. Here's roughly what I added.

I've been doing more fractional work lately, and the outreach has shifted. More organisations with almost no internal development knowledge are realising the limits of what they've been building and wanting an expert look at it. There's going to be plenty of that work.

The bigger question is how we upskill people if they're not going through the learning process we did. That problem already exists. Plenty of people have "senior" in their title with shallow expertise, because most of their career was picking up tickets with acceptance criteria handed to them. I'm not talking about the best of the best here. I'm talking about the other 90%.

Inside organisations, there's still a lot of room for the very human back-and-forth on what you're actually building, and for navigating politics and org structures. What excites me is the appetite to build. Companies that couldn't imagine owning their own stack now want to. They're about to learn the ups and downs of that for the first time, and there's plenty of opportunity for us all there, too.

Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 are sea change level models. Between the increased capability and reduced cost, these things are absolutely insane.

Last weekend, I wanted a project to build while I was out of the house that could really put them through their paces (and didn't seem like my day job). So, for the first time in my life, I asked my computer to build me a game. In fact, the next day, with some tweaks I asked it again. Fair to say I'm absolutely blown away.

I know AI is meant to be the death of creativity, but I think that's nonsense. I can only imagine how fun and creative I would have been if I had access to these when I was a teenager and had all that free time. Now, it's nearly as easy to build a game—your own very specific game—as it is to play one.

If you're spending as much time as me copying screenshots into AI agents and then awkwardly trying to describe your feedback... I've built a free Mac app to help.

https://apps.apple.com/app/shot-and-tell/id6814688859

Handy site here from Cloudflare. I'm not sure you actually need to score 100 on this, but it'll be useful to run through for StayUpfront.

StayUpfront is now open, so here's a snazzy new promo video.

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No team ever shipped faster by keeping its options open. And the cost of being wrong has never been lower — most technical calls are cheaper to make, and cheaper to undo, than they've ever been.

The expensive thing isn't picking wrong, it's the months spent not picking at all. A team that keeps reopening the same argument has no momentum to lose, because it never built any.

Pick a direction, get everyone building, and change your mind when there's a real reason to.

I may be a certified Claude-fanboi, but Anthropic sure do make it hard to love them. Rather than a request they can deny, this should be a simple toggle switch on their platform settings.

Bluesky took a 24-hour DDoS in April, came back with no data loss and a straight account of what happened. That's not a feature, it's a trust signal — and the hardest thing for a rival to copy. Nobody churns over a nicer composer. They churn because you went dark and got cagey.