The AI era
How AI is changing developer work, the market for developers and what gets valued.
A vibe-coded product isn't done at the first deploy
PHP and Next.js flaws, 1,094 Microsoft fixes, 95,000 CVEs in 2026: a vibe-coded product is never done, and its maintenance starts on the day you deploy.
Using AI to code a music video engine from scratch
My wife is a singer and her music videos are a headache. Instead of a shoot or an AI-generated video, I coded a custom engine that renders each video.
What if we're collectively using AI the wrong way?
Rebuilding the Adobe suite with AI just redoes what exists, faster. The real winners will use AI to do new things and do better, not just go faster.
AI code review: the referee has to be you
An AI reviewing its own code says it is fine; reviewing another agent's, it always finds fault. The verdict depends on the question, so you must be the judge.
Building a program: the questions AI can't settle for you
Subdomains, bounded contexts, architecture, data, scale, security, prod: the questions to ask when you build a program, which AI alone cannot settle.
"Co-Authored-By: Claude": the three camps of the debate
Keep or remove "Co-Authored-By: Claude" from your commits? Honesty, a metric, visual noise, free advertising: the arguments of the debate, summed up.
"Co-Authored-By: Claude" in my commits? 100%
Working flat out with AI and hiding every trace of it makes no sense. Co-authored changes nothing: the commit is still my responsibility.
Have Claude record the demo video of your feature
To get a finished local feature signed off: Claude writes a test scenario, plays it in the browser and records it as a captioned video.
My agentic workflow: worktrees, TDD, reviews and a master
5-6 parallel sessions, one worktree per task, an advanced harness, enforced TDD, 8 review agents and a master session: my current agentic workflow.
With AI, you can learn faster than ever
Does AI stop us from learning? Not if you ask it to teach you how to do things instead of doing them for you. With a bit of effort, it is a real catalyst.
Worn out by the pace of AI? Go back to the fundamentals
Releases, workflows, tools: with AI, every developer now feels the fatigue JS developers know well. My remedy: the fundamentals, stable and lasting.
Software architecture and craftsmanship in the AI era
Transaction Script, DDD, Clean Architecture, CQRS, TDD, SOLID, Big Ball of Mud: working on software architecture has never been more useful or accessible.
Maintenance effort = Integration strength × Distance × Volatility
Vlad Khononov's formula from DDD Europe: maintenance effort is strength times distance times volatility, and zeroing just one dimension collapses it.
The next big IT purchase for SMEs? A mini data center
Local models are finally credible, and the US CLOUD Act is real: an SME's next big IT purchase might be a machine instead of a cloud AI subscription.
Reaching 10x in the agentic era starts by going 0.3x
To ship 10x faster with AI agents, you first have to slow down: a solid harness, clean parallelisation and mastered CI/CD before you accelerate.
Orca: one glance at every repo, worktree and agent
An ADE that shows every repo and its worktrees, with the status of each agent at a glance: with 3 to 6 parallel sessions, visibility changes everything.
My support offer for SMEs that build tools with AI
AI-built internal tools getting out of control, insecure, fragile? Here is how I help small businesses get them back on track, progressively, at their own pace.
As many developer setups as there are developers
IDE, ADE, terminal, keyboard or voice, one or ten agents: ways of coding have exploded with AI. My current setup, and a call to compare yours.
Harness Engineer: the developer job of tomorrow?
When you barely write code by hand, the real guardrail for AI is the harness. A portrait of the Harness Engineer, the ultimate senior of the agentic era.
With AI you go faster. Above all, you can do better
AI makes you faster, but the real game is elsewhere: doing better. Average projects will drown; those that use AI to raise the bar will go far.
The developer market is shifting
Large dev teams are shrinking because of AI. Meanwhile, small businesses are starting to build their own internal tools and will need experts a few days a month.
Sound architecture, poor features: you'll survive
Sound architecture with poor features, you survive. Shaky architecture with correct features, everything is a fight. And it is the hardest part of the job.
Experience-based daily rates no longer measure anything
Daily rate grids were built on years of experience because the keyboard capped the gap between good and bad developers. With AI, that bottleneck is gone.
The part-time senior developer: a new freelancing model
In companies where the product only supports the business, vibe-coding hits a wall fast. A senior developer a few days a month is often enough to lift it.
The next bottleneck in software development is RAM
AI moved the bottleneck from writing to reviewing. The next one is hardware: running five agents in parallel needs a machine not everyone will have.
The time AI saves you: spend it on quantity or quality?
Two ways to use the time AI saves you: ship more MVPs, sites and features, or ship the same amount at higher quality. Why I lean towards quality.
Scaling a vibe-coded MVP: when heavy operations blow up
A heavy operation the AI runs in memory holds up in a prototype, then blows up as users pile in. Without queues or observability, good luck finding why.
Learning efficiently: the dev skill nobody talks about
With AI, a developer's value lies in architecture and the business. You still have to learn them: rephrase, summarise, cross-check, take your time.
With AI, less secure code and more confident developers
A Stanford study: developers using AI wrote less secure code and felt more confident about it. The fix: have an AI with a fresh context audit the code.
AI does what you tell it, and only what you tell it
Security, consistency with existing code, upcoming needs: what you never ask AI for gives an app that looks perfect on the surface but is riddled with problems.
IDOR: the security hole AI leaves in your routes
AI builds a route that returns an invoice by its id, but forgets to check who owns it. Here is the 3-step test to spot an IDOR in your own app.
Your secret API keys might be visible to everyone
AI puts keys wherever they work: in the bundle, so on everyone's machine. Here is how to check whether your secret API keys are visible on your website.
Supabase and RLS: the 2-minute check
AI sometimes forgets to enable RLS on Supabase tables created via SQL, and then anyone can read your database. Here is how to check it in 2 minutes.
A CVE on Lovable apps: the real cost of vibe coding
An official CVE on Lovable apps: with no data access rules, anyone can read the database. The app works, the demo looks great, and the door is wide open.
The dream all-AI-agent dev pipeline… and its weak spot
Agents that do everything, from specs to production, with no human supervision and 100% on Claude. Until the day Anthropic botches an update.
Writing code is easy now. Building a system is not.
With AI, writing code has become as easy as learning to write as a child. Building a complex, coherent system that lasts is still as hard as a masterpiece.
AI will shrink the number of developers… or the opposite
AI only cuts the number of developers if projects stay flat. My bet is the opposite: far more projects, of better quality, so even more developers needed.
Stay employable: ask Claude what it is bad at
A Claude Code tip to stay employable: ask it what it will stay mediocre at for a while, then work hard on exactly those skills to get ready for what's next.