AI Doesn’t Remove Technical Debt - It Accelerates It
The hope is that AI will finally help us clear technical debt. We argue it’s closer to the opposite - the fastest debt-generator we’ve ever...
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The Cynical Developer
Why should I even care about this!?
Episodes
20 of 202 episodes
AI Doesn’t Care About Your Tech Stack
Developers love a stack argument. We look at how AI quietly makes much of it irrelevant - by collapsing the cost of working in something unf...
Why Most Companies Are Using AI Completely Wrong
Most companies are doing something with AI — and measuring the wrong thing. We look at the adoption trap, why activity keeps getting mistake...
The Future Developer Is Closer to a Product Engineer
As building gets cheap, the bottleneck moves from “how” to “what”. We look at the rise of the product-minded engineer - someone who understa...
Why AI Is Making Good Engineers More Valuable
A fear runs under a lot of AI conversations: that experienced engineers are worth less now the machine can write code. We argue it’s close t...
The Junior Developer Crisis Nobody Is Talking About
If AI writes the boilerplate, tests and CRUD screens juniors used to learn on, how does anyone become senior? We look at the apprenticeship...
The End of Coding Interviews As We Know Them
The whiteboard puzzle always tested the one mode the job never uses - alone, from memory, no help. We look at why AI finally makes that impo...
Prompt Engineering Is Dead - Long Live Specification Engineering
We argue prompt engineering is already on its way out - and what’s replacing it is one of the oldest skills in software. When generating cod...
AI Is Creating Two Kinds of Developers
A quiet split is forming in software teams - not junior versus senior, but developers who’ve learned to work with AI and those who’ve decide...
Why Your Team Doesn’t Own Anything
We dig into the gap between responsibility and ownership - why so many teams are accountable for outcomes they were never given the authorit...
Remote Work Didn’t Kill Productivity - Bad Management Did
We take on the tidy story that remote work killed productivity. It didn’t - it removed the things that were hiding weak management. We look...
The Real Cost of Context Switching
We look at a cost that never shows up on any report: the wreckage an interruption leaves behind. Not the thirty-second question, but the twe...
Why Promotions Rarely Go to the Best Engineers
We pull apart a quiet truth most teams can see but rarely say: the strongest engineer often isn’t the one who gets promoted. We look at why...
Psychological Safety Is Not Being Nice
“Psychological safety” has quietly become a synonym for “being nice”, and in this episode we explain why that’s a problem. We look at what i...
Episode 27 - Performance Reviews Are Broken
Why do performance reviews reward visibility over impact, and why do so many developers leave them feeling misunderstood? In this episode, J...
Episode 26 - Why Developers Quit (And Don't Tell You Why)
Developers leave jobs all the time, but rarely share the real reasons. James explores why developers quit and what companies miss.
Episode 25 - What Managers Need to Stop Doing
James takes aim at management practices that are hurting developer productivity and morale. What do managers need to stop doing?
Episode 24 - Spec-Driven Development: How You Actually Work With AI
James explores spec-driven development and how it changes the way developers actually work with AI tools to build better software.
Episode 23 - When AI Makes Your Codebase Worse
AI can help write code, but it can also make your codebase worse. James explores the pitfalls of AI-generated code and how to avoid them.
Episode 22 - The Ethics of AI in Software Teams
As AI becomes embedded in software development, ethical questions arise. James discusses the moral considerations teams should be thinking a...