Utah software engineer writing about tech and management dysfunction. Former SF, work at AI startups, live with pugs. Strong opinions on everything from AI Engineering to Silicon Valley culture. Hackerpug: honest takes on what's broken.
Wow, We're Not Going to Need You Soon AI will write code. Humans will own what happens after. Recently I was sitting in a meeting with a startup founder building an app for teachers. I was there as the "technical resource" — a phrase that secretly means
Or: How I became the person I used to silently judge in architecture reviews Engineers are like hoarders, but for patterns. We pick up mental models that served us well once, and then we clutch them like a security blanket through every job change, every framework migration, every paradigm shift.
The Rosetta Stone Between "That Looks Nice" and "That Actually Works" Picture this: You've just finished the design for your next app in Figma. It's gorgeous. The colors pop. The UX makes sense. You want to throw on your black turtleneck and
So researchers just discovered that you can get an AI to help you build a nuclear weapon. All you have to do is ask nicely. In verse. I'm not kidding. A newly published preprint from the Icaro Lab at Sapienza University found that framing harmful requests as poems
Designing with Google Stitch From Metaprompting to JSON Precision Picture this: You've got a product idea. A good one. The kind that wakes you up at 3 AM with that dangerous cocktail of excitement and dread. You've thought through the database schema. You know exactly how
The Siren Song of DRY Look, I need to confess something: I fell for it. Hard. The promise was intoxicating: One schema to rule them all. A single source of truth. Convex database schemas that automatically become API types that automatically become UI types. Change it once, update everywhere. The
Picture this: I'm sitting in my home office in Utah, staring at a React Native app with a list of forms that's about to become a performance nightmare, and I'm doing what every engineer does when they hit a wall—I'm making
If there's one thing I've learned from my exhausting love affair with Convex (yes, I'm a fanboy—and here's why), it's that good architecture doesn't come from inspiration. It comes from repeatedly making mistakes and finally surrendering to
I've spent the last few projects using Convex, which is a funny thing to say because it sounds like I chose this path, like I sat down with a spreadsheet and did a careful analysis. That's not what happened. What actually happened is I kept making
The Call is Coming from Inside the Codebase Darkness falls across the land—well, more like a crisp October evening in Salt Lake City. The kind of night where the air feels charged, like the city itself knows something you don't. I'm sitting in a coffee
Picture this: It's late-October. Black Friday is coming. I want to buy a Sactional—you know, the age appropriate adult version of "The Lovesac" beanbag we all had in our college dorm room. This couch takes up your entire living room and is so comfortable it
TL;DR: Multi-agent AI coding has the same coordination problems as human teams. The solution? Treat your AI agents like developers—give them sprint planning, standup logs, and TDD. I've been building a production app this way and it's 2x faster with zero agent conflicts. AI