Every week, another breathless headline declares software engineering dead. Another AI demo shows a chatbot building a full-stack app in 90 seconds. Another LinkedIn thought leader posts a funeral wreath emoji next to the words "traditional coding." And every week, I watch senior engineers at real companies quietly doing something that looks nothing like those demos. They're not typing code line b
You asked Claude to build a feature. It worked. You shipped it. Six weeks later, you're adding something related, and nothing makes sense anymore. The code is technically correct but completely opaque. You can't remember why anything was structured this way. Claude can't figure it out either — it starts guessing, and the guesses start breaking things. This is the scenario I keep seeing. And it's n
State of Software Engineering in 2026: A Reality Check Beyond the AI Hype Three and a half years ago, Matt Welsh, PhD and former Google engineer, published "The End of Programming" in Communications of the ACM and declared that classical computer science was over. The meteor had hit. Engineers were the dinosaurs. The state of software engineering in 2026, he implied, would look nothing like what
When you have 5 unrelated questions, should you pack them into one message to the LLM, or send 5 requests simultaneously? Which is faster? Splitting into multiple independent parallel requests is almost always faster. This isn't a gut feeling — it's determined by the underlying inference mechanism of LLMs. Let's walk through the reasoning from first principles. To understand this problem, you firs