AI & Systems Debt


If there's one AI article you read today, make sure it's this one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonwingard/2026/04/23/vibe-coding-will-break-your-company

This isn't an anti-AI or AI-is-terrible take. This is a real & grounded take on the very real problem that AI is allowing us to move faster that the decision-time is compressed.

Over the course of my career, I learned that the shift towards "seniority" isn't just that you have more of the core skills and are faster and better. It's that you become wiser about when to use those skills. You ask fundamental questions like: What new problems do we create by solving this? If we build this, who will maintain it? If we build this, will this distract us from our priorities? If we build this will we set some new expectations that we'll have to uphold? Just because something has value doesn't mean it doesn't create a form of debt in the long run. And these were all important to consider before GenAI and coding agents came along.

AI can move so fast that you can proliferate and accumulate debt faster than you realize, and faster than you can support, and faster than you may want.

We used to talk about "failing fast" (build a small MVP, try it out, learn and refine from the failures quickly, and then iterate). With AI, it's possible to flood the system with so many possible solutions that we'll further constrain our decisioning.

It all reminds me of a joke I used to make in the earlier 2010s when RSS & News Feeds had proliferated so that actual news wasn't keep pace with our ability to consume it. I'd catch up on all my feeds and then have to wait for something to happen. If today's "news" feed is any example of how much noise we can generate, as engineering leaders we need to ensure we expand our decision-time and not compress it further. 

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Work Experience vs Professional Experience

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Let's Clear Up The Ambiguity!

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FAQs for a Software Engineering Hiring Manager

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7 Steps to Writing an Amazing Resume

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  Since sharing my resume template  I've received plenty of feedback from job seekers, HR and hiring managers - all of whom value its purpose. Two (now former!) jobseekers even shared that as soon as they used my template, they were getting calls. Something about this template works, and given the traction it's getting others, I wanted to share - in more detail - why  this approach works so well.  Before continuing, let me give an important disclaimer: This resume isn't a miracle cure that's going to land anyone their dream job. Unless they're filled with lies, resumes are only as good as the candidate themselves. But they can also be a whole lot worse. This template and approach are all about maximizing the potential candidates have by highlighting and summarizing key areas.  Last point before beginning: If you don't know me, it's worth stating this advice comes from more than a decade of having hiring a broad range of coders: straight out of college, hig...
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Where is MySpace Headed?

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MySpace seems to be trying to condense the internet under a single domain name. Pearl Jam has a MySpace account. Weezer has one. Just about every band has a MySpace account to host their music, and operate as a fan club. Their own websites used to do this, but with MySpace their websites have become redundant.  I'm thinking this will cause MySpace to collapse. It's trying to offer too much while not offering much. It's trying to BE the internet, but by simplifying it down to what the majority of users want on a website. Thinking back to websites of 1997, 1998, the more personalize websites which may have had a lot of dancing hamsters, midi songs playing in the background, silly scripts that changed your mouse icon and had stars that followed the mouse, and yet offered no real content. That feels like what MySpace is today, only now it's even easier to set up, and even less likely to house meaningful content (he wrote on his all important website; I get the irony.) Many ...
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