We Can’t Name Variables. Now We’re Writing Prompts? We used to rely on compilers for clarity. Now we rely on language models that don’t throw errors when we’re imprecise. Programming is becoming less about logic and more about articulation in natural language.
What AI Hype Misses About Real Software Engineering Work AI coding tools are brilliant at creating new code. But most engineers don’t just create new code. They work in legacy systems, where the challenge isn’t writing, it’s understanding. We need more than just generation from AI coding tools. We also need comprehension.
Avoid Fakers in Unit Tests Unless you are fuzz testing or your goal is to create property-based tests, test data generators (a.k.a. fakers) are likely to do more harm than good in the long run.
What is a Unit Test? There is a lot of confusion about what unit tests are and how they differ from integration tests. This post provides one viewpoint on what unit tests are.
What Does Bad Code Look Like? What does bad code look like? It may be more interesting to think about bad code in terms of what it feels like.