TL;DR - The cost of servicing technical debt is plummeting because of LLMs; assuming coding models keep improving. You're better off taking more technical de...
Your Laptop Isn’t Ready for LLMs. That’s About to Change
The quest to run large AI models locally on an individual's machine are driving the biggest change in laptop architecture in decades.
The death of the junior developer
LLMs are putting pressure on junior tech jobs. Learn how to stay ahead.
Best LLM for Coding 2026 | AI Coding Model Rankings & Benchmarks
Which AI model writes the best code? We rank every major LLM — open and closed source — across SWE-bench, HumanEval, LiveCodeBench, and Terminal-Bench coding benchmarks. Compare the best LLMs for coding, software engineering, and programming.
Prompts are technical debt too
It’s common and correct to say that “all code is technical debt”. Adding code is a necessary evil for developing new features: you almost always have to do it, but each line of code adds to the complexity and maintenance burden of the system. All future changes to the system have to work with the existing code, or at least avoid breaking it. Once systems accumulate enough code, they become impossible for a single person to understand: instead of reading the code and understanding what it does, you must rely on guesses, theories and heuristics1. Sensible engineers write as little code as possible.
The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory – Dan Shapiro's Blog
In my last post, I wrote about technical deflation. We’re seeing the cost of code is dropping so fast that we need to change our tech debt payment plans. The smart teams…
Code Is Cheap Now. Software Isn’t.
The barrier to entry for building software has collapsed. The barrier to building something that matters hasn’t moved an inch.
You have to beat the models at something
In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their company, but how much they…
Comprehension Debt: The Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code
Psst. If your boss won’t invest in training you in Specification By Example (BDD, ATDD), I’m running out-of-hours workshops on May 12 and 16 specifically for self-funding learners. £99 + UK VAT. An…
LLMs reward expertise
In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. Today, everyone can write sort-of-okay CSS by delegating the task to an LLM. LLMs make everybody into a generalist.
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time...
One year as an AI Engineer: The 5 biggest misconceptions about LLM reliability I've encountered
535 votes, 59 comments. After spending a year building evaluation frameworks and debugging production LLM systems, I've noticed the same…
open-slopware
Free/Open Source Software choosing to use and/or support LLM usage/AI, as well as alternatives and tips to requesting better policies or forking.
The Ultimate Guide to Fine-Tuning LLMs from Basics to Breakthroughs: An Exhaustive Review of Technologies, Research, Best Practices, Applied Research Challenges and Opportunities (Version 1.0)
Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed
I have been a director of engineering for a bit over three years now, and I still hear and read what I call the "old rules" repeated over and over: a director should not spend time coding, good work takes time, protect the team from the business, get consensus before
