Tag · 7 essays
Writing tagged "Craft".
Two free skills can strip the AI tells out of your writing in seconds. Nobody uses them. So every feed is now a slop fest of em dashes, rule-of-three lists, and It's not just X, it's Y. Here is how to spot the patterns and stop shipping them.
When folks think they're failing at AI coding, they're usually failing at their laptop. Before you brief an agent well, your machine has to be a predictable place.
In 2013 I built the Need for Speed Rivals launch site from scratch in five weeks - custom router, custom state, custom tweening engine, 35 languages, no framework worth mentioning. I rebuilt it recently for my Vue.js Amsterdam 2026 talk. The contrast broke my brain in the best way, and it clarified something I've been trying to articulate about AI, abstraction, and what "craft" actually means now.
Coding is largely solved. Agents with a great product vision can produce what used to take teams weeks. But the act of writing code by hand isn't dying - it's transforming from a necessity into a craft. Like knitting, you won't need to do it. You'll choose to.
After twenty years of engineering, I accidentally ended up running multiple product lines. My approach (build first, spec later, let AI handle the translation) isn't traditional PM work. But it might be where the role is heading. Here's why engineers who produce before they plan might have an unfair advantage in the age of AI.
Developer teams migrating from legacy to modern architecture often bring old habits that become technical debt. Executive pressure and budget constraints drive rushed migrations without adapting to new paradigms. Success requires stopping to discover how modern systems actually work, designing ideal workflows without legacy constraints, and recognizing that migration is about transforming how you model and manage content, not just moving it between systems.
The promise of AI-powered development is seductive, but here's the reality check nobody's talking about - the better you understand code, the better your AI-generated results will be. LLMs code like humans with high IQs and unstoppable work ethic. Treat them as junior developers and learn the fundamentals to multiply your vibe coding power.