Software Engineering

Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, ChatGPT, Gemini — I call them my assistants. Lately, I’m not so sure who’s assisting whom. Agentic tools keep handing me decisions in the same shape:– Option 1 (Recommended)– Option 2– Other When I know the domain, I actually choose. When I half-know it, I read the alternatives and […]

Foreword: Thorngate’s postulate of commensurate complexity The postulate of commensurate complexity is a description of a phenomenon in social science theorizing. Karl E. Weick claims that research in social psychology can always only possess two of the three meta-theoretical characteristics: ‘Generality’, ‘Accuracy’, and ‘Simplicity’. Therefore, one of these three characteristics must always be subordinated to […]

In 1995, Watts Humphrey handed every developer a personal process. It failed. His Personal Software Process (PSP) let a single developer run a defined, measured, continuously improving process. It worked, but the bookkeeping killed it. Time logs, defect logs, forms after every task. Almost nobody could sustain it. Humphrey moved on to team processes, and […]

If you use AI for coding every day, you may have noticed something strange: Your AI coding assistant gets dumber the longer you talk to it. Most developers feel it but can’t name it: you start a chat, it’s brilliant. An hour later — same model, same task — it’s forgetting your instructions and repeating […]

Foreword A host of the timid avails not in war — One warrior man is better than a hundred thousand. Andrew Ng — founder of DeepLearning.AI and co-founder of Google Brain — has a clear yet challenging message for software developers watching the world of AI: “AI won’t replace software developers, but software developers who […]