4 posts tagged with "Engineering Culture"

It is Tuesday morning and a product manager is running the company's checkout page on their laptop. Not a mockup of it. The actual app, on localhost, on a branch called proto/split-payments, with seed data loaded. They ask Claude Code to let a customer split an order across two cards. Four minutes later they are clicking through it. The confirmation screen looks wrong when one card is a gift card with a low balance, so they call the designer over, and the two of them fix the layout in the running product while the agent keeps up.

By lunch they have found six edge cases nobody would have written into a requirements document, killed one idea (three-way splits), and written down why. No engineer has touched it yet. No Figma file exists. The engineer will be pulled in on Thursday, once the PM and designer are satisfied, and their job will not be "build this." It will be "make this safe to ship."

If you want to understand why AI works the way it does today, you don't need to read a hundred papers. You need to read about five, in order, and understand what each one changed. Everything since is, to a first approximation, a refinement or a scaling-up of ideas these introduced.

When you build software with an AI agent day to day, the thing you run out of first isn't intelligence — it's context. The window is finite, attention inside it isn't free, and a session that starts sharp gets duller as it fills with the exhaust of the work: verbose command output, whole files read to find one function, stale documentation, the residue of three tasks ago.

Here is a shift that has already happened, whether or not your documentation noticed: a large and growing share of the readers of everything you write are no longer human. They're language models — reading your docs to answer a question, your README to use your library, your marketing page to tell someone what you do. Andrej Karpathy has been making this point for a while, and it lands harder every month: the primary reader of a lot of your writing is now an LLM, and you are probably still writing for a human.