Dmytro

Claiming that yesterday’s senior engineers will become tomorrow’s juniors because of AI completely misses what software engineering actually is. It is the classic mistake of confusing tool hype with real engineering expertise. The argument that horse carriage makers were mad when cars showed up sounds witty, but it exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of technological revolutions. … Read more

“Tests are documentation” is useful advice, up to a point. A well-written test can show how a component behaves and what its callers may expect. But it is easy to ask tests to explain more than they can. This becomes particularly noticeable when an AI assistant is asked to change an unfamiliar project. Consider a … Read more

I’ve been using AI assistants to write and change code. This has made me look more closely at how easy it is to find all the code involved in a single operation. Take an order API. A new rule says that orders above a certain value need approval before they are sent to a supplier. … Read more

I keep seeing the same advice about AI coding agents: write a detailed specification first, then let the agent build the software. Clear requirements certainly help. But how detailed can the specification be before we have tried to build anything? Suppose we need to import a supplier’s product catalogue. The task looks simple: We can … Read more

Grady Booch recently reminded us of Edsger W. Dijkstra’s essay EWD 667. It raises a question that feels especially relevant now: if we can tell an AI assistant what we want in plain English, will we eventually stop using programming languages? Suppose I ask an AI assistant to add a discount to an order: Give … Read more