// Topics / Software Development

Software Development

Development work gets better when interfaces stay small, feedback is fast, and tooling serves the codebase instead of distracting from it.

The AI-assisted development posts here treat AI like a junior developer with useful speed and real failure modes. The goal is not novelty. The goal is better throughput without lowering standards.

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Practical Rules

  • Keep generated code behind the same review and test standards as human-written code.
  • Use AI for acceleration, not for unstated architecture decisions.
  • Prefer small, reviewable changes over broad rewrites.
  • Make observability and rollback part of production development, not cleanup work.

Supporting Reads

Failure Modes

  • Treating AI-generated boilerplate as production-ready because it compiles.
  • Letting tools change architecture without explicit review.
  • Adopting development tools before measuring the workflow they improve.
  • Replacing feedback loops with prompt rituals.

References

    AI Pair Programming: It's a Junior Dev, Not a Wizard Treat AI coding assistants like a fast, literal junior dev: tight constraints, critical review, and no expectations of architectural insight. ai engineering productivity Running LLMs Locally: A Team Guide With Ollama and Go Local AI is no longer a hobby project. How to set it up properly: provider abstraction, versioned models, eval harnesses, and a cloud fallback. llm development privacy AI Code Review Is Mostly Noise Months of AI code review on real PRs: about 22% of comments get accepted. How I scope prompts, track hit rate, and keep it out of merge gates. engineering ai development Monorepo vs. Polyrepo: A Practical Decision Guide Monorepo or polyrepo depends on coupling, team shape, and your appetite for build tooling. Here is how to decide without getting religious about it. architecture development developer-experience Observability-Driven Development: Instrument Before You Ship Observability-driven development without the jargon: structured logs, RED metrics, traces, and SLO alerts that ship with each feature. observability development reliability State of Linux Usability 2020: Distros vs Windows and macOS A non-technical user ran 16 everyday tasks on the top 20 Linux distros plus Windows and macOS. Pop!_OS, Mint, and Ubuntu beat both commercial systems. engineering development reflection Incremental TypeScript Migration Without Losing Your Mind How to introduce TypeScript to a real JavaScript codebase incrementally, without halting product work or annoying your entire team. engineering databases development