Software Fundamentals Matter More Than Ever
The Talk That Confirmed What I’ve Been Seeing
The books haven’t changed. The principles haven’t changed. The context has.
Matt Pocock stood on stage at the AI Engineer Summit and said something that most of the audience needed to hear: the developers who succeed with AI coding agents aren’t the ones who delegate everything. They’re the ones who fall back on engineering fundamentals [1].
On the Loop, Not In It — But Code Quality Still Matters
On the Loop, Not In It — But Code Quality Still Matters
Yesterday one of my AI agents wasted 15 minutes chasing a bug that didn’t exist. The function was called transformPayload() — but it didn’t transform anything. It validated. The agent built three layers of transformation logic on top of it before realizing the name was a lie. I’ve seen this pattern dozens of times now. And it’s exactly why I think Kief Morris’s latest piece gets the big picture right but undersells one critical detail.