Blog
John Allan Nielsen
AI unleashed
In August, AI to me was autocomplete and a chat window, and I wasn't impressed. Now I hand plans to up to thirty agents at a time, on a backend merge that isn't allowed any downtime. The agents only run loose because the plan is tight: how I decide what to hand over, why a couple of hours of planning is the expensive part, and what the review caught when the agents wrote Java in Go.
Feeling like a hot chick
At the end of September a club signed with us almost without being sold to. Its members had used our kiosks at other venues and came home asking "Why not here?" This post is about what that does to you as an engineer: working on the product everyone wants, and why that makes me want to do my best work.
Enter the project manager
Somebody reviewed one of our pull requests properly, line by line, and approved it — while the author was still pushing to the branch. The approval landed on a version that no longer existed. That is a symptom; the disease is that a code review here could be requested four different correct ways and therefore reached nobody. On queues that aren't queues, what coding agents did to our capacity to review, and why the fix begins by deleting one of the places we ask. Enter the project manager.
99% excitement, 1% concern
I spent a Saturday evening watching a movie while an agent rewrote one of our frontends from Vue to React. It was live a couple of days later. The interesting part isn't the AI — it's what a company has to be like for that to be allowed, the one concern management actually raised, and why an environment that says yes this fast demands more discipline, not less.
My brother from another mother?
I started a job where the other half of the technical side had begun the day before me, with a title next to mine and no line drawn between them. A stranger, as new as I was, and the two of us apparently expected to steer the same team. What I was actually worried about, and what a month has and hasn't settled.
Road to glory
At a previous job I restructured 250,000 lines of code, and a task that had taken two days started taking three minutes. Nobody got a hundred times better at programming — the restructuring deleted everything that wasn't the work. Then frontend developers started picking up backend tickets. This is the plan to do that again here, and the part of it that gets worse before it gets better.
In the jungle
Part of my onboarding was a task with my name on it: get every codebase running locally. Seventy-one repositories, a decade of technology choices, and two weeks of finding out which of them could still start on a fresh machine — including the one whose local database could not be built at all, and what it took to make one command build it anyway.