If you want to improve quickly, one of the best things you can do is take on something genuinely difficult.
Hard problems expose the weaknesses you used to overlook—or simply chose to ignore.
More importantly, the feedback they give you is brutally honest. It shows you, as objectively as possible, where your current level really is. That can be uncomfortable, and sometimes even embarrassing, but that discomfort is exactly what makes the process so valuable.
Once I started using AI to help me write, I noticed a few patterns.
It opens with something that sounds profound: "In this era of rapid change, X is redefining how we ..."
Or: "Most people think X. The real problem is Y."
Lately I read Andrew Ng's new post on X, AI Engineering Skills Map: Shaping the build, and it made me, an engineer of more than ten years, anxious about my career.
The core is one sentence: a strong software engineer in the AI era has to move past implementing requirements someon…
Read more — 14. When Code Gets Cheap, Where Does a Developer's Value Go
For more than twenty years the internet ran on a stable supply-and-demand relationship where everyone, or nearly everyone, won.
Sites like blogs gave search engines free content to crawl, and the search engines sent traffic back to those sites. Advertisers could then use that pul…
Read more — 10. When AI Takes the Content, Where Does the Traffic Go
I once watched a documentary where a business owner spent a week living as a poor person so he could explain why poor people stay poor.
After selling his labor for a life that was not so dignified, the owner reached this conclusion:
The main problem with working for a living is t…
Read more — 11. Work Crowds Out the Time to Think About the Future
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