Guest Post: Robots and Drones Are the Same Thing (And Pretending Otherwise Is Holding Us Back)
Guest Post by Luca Herlein
The artificial divide between robotics and drone ecosystems made sense once. Today, it’s holding back the entire industry.
AI-Boosted Building - It's All About Agency
A Scottish football manager once said, “Some people think football is more important than life. But they are wrong. It’s much more important than that.” When intelligence becomes a utility, the ability to ACT on it becomes everything. In today’s software world, Agency is more important than anything else!
Don't Miss the Train!
The AI train has left the station. Some of us are on board, generating entire modules from specs. Others are still on the platform debating whether the train is even real. Four smart people wrote about this shift this past week. They all agree on what it means. And I agree with them.
Automation Is Robotics (And You're Already Building Robots)
If software changes something in the real world, it’s a robot.
The Three Tiers of Software Development (Where will you land?)
Software development is stratifying into three distinct tiers. Where you land will determine whether you make more money, the same, or far less than today.
The New Whale Chase: Drones, Hydrophones, and a Father-Son Project
After two years of false starts with the Bristlemouth platform and permit headaches, I’m revisiting my whale song project with a completely different approach: semi-autonomous floating drones. The regulatory landscape has forced a rethink, and honestly, it might lead to something better.
2025 In Review: The Year AI Changed Everything
Looking back at 2025, one theme dominates: AI agentic programming went from novelty to necessity. This year transformed how I think about software development, career advice, and even my personal hardware projects. Here’s what I wrote about, what I learned, and what I expect in 2026.
Programming Languages in 2026
Popularity, Jobs, LLM Proficiency, Concurrency Complexity, and Deployment Complexity
Five factors now drive language choice: developer adoption, job market demand, LLM code generation quality, concurrency handling, and deployment complexity. Here’s how they intersect.
Foreign Cinema: My Favorite Restaurant in the World
A friend recently asked me about restaurants in San Francisco and was shocked I’d never written about Foreign Cinema. Honestly? I was shocked too. It’s my favorite restaurant in the world. Yes, the world. And I travel to London, Paris, Mexico City…
Coding is Solved (And That's Fine)
“We are nearly at coder-equivalency for economically useful coding. A sufficiently experienced software engineer can now write >90% of production-ready code purely through prompting.” Yes, exactly.