Passionate CTO driving high-performing teams | Bridging business strategy with technology | Ruby on Rails.
Bristol, Uk
Joined June 2008
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17 votes • Final resultsWhile this is not a direct answer to the points raised here by @v0xium (and I certainly don't want to dismiss how they feel), I'm trying to explore here how, as managers we can try to combat this.
Tools are tools, yes. But AI tools comes with a lot more responsibilities when it comes to leadership introductions. It's tempting to always ask for more. But I'll keep beating the same drum again and again. We shouldn't always care about more. What we want is better.
Leaders (C levels, team leads etc) it all start with teaching your developers delegation skills. This is something that is not natural for a developer, and if you want the best results in your team, teach them to delegate and not trust.
nicalpi.com/blog/nobody-taug…
I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.
I've been quiet here for a while.
In January I froze our tech hiring plan. I wanted to understand what AI was going to do to my dev team before I added anyone to it.
I assumed the answer would be about which tool won — pick the best coding agent, roll it out.
I was wrong.
The output depended on the developer, not the tool. They wrote code fine.
They had no idea how we wanted them to work.
So I documented our workflow the way I'd onboard a new hire — explaining how we plan, build, and test.
That's where the gain showed up, and it had very little to do with code.
It was in the work that used to get done badly, or not at all, before anyone opened an editor. Planning, stories, acceptance criteria — the stuff we always skipped or half-did.
50-odd tickets through that workflow so far, a low rejection rate, and senior developers who resisted at first telling me they're doing a better job.
I finally wrote about the beginning of my findings on how, as CTO I approached introducing our AI workflow in my development team -> nicalpi.com/blog/ai-measurin…
I have a serious question for software developers. Help me reach as many people as possible 🙏
If you're using any AI coding tools regularly/daily right now (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI whatever).
How do they make you feel as a developer?
* Super Human*: I can build as many things as possible so fast 💨
*Focussed*: Speed it not my priority, but I get to achieve more focus by having an AI thing working alongside me all day 🧘♀️
*Lazy*: Why do I even need to work, when a black box can write my code while I warm up another coffee 🥱
*Frustrated*: Yea, I guess it's cool, but doesn't this thing can fix that very simple bug!!! 🤬
Nicolas Alpi 🍪 retweeted
🚨 Major active supply chain attack just hit npm.
Popular package @ctrl/tinycolor was trojanized — and it didn’t stop there. Over 40 packages were silently modified to steal secrets from dev machines & CI pipelines.
Our team at Socket caught it. Full report coming soon. Stay safe out there.
**Senior software developer 👴 VS AI 🤖 (a 🧵)**
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I've been developing software professionally for 25+ years. I'm not a CTO but still very much enjoy coding and problem solving.
I've worked with, mentored, and up-skilled a ton of more junior developers over my time in the industry.
</context>
So yea, our job as CTOs / Senior developers are rapidly changing. Does it mean it will be less enjoyable coding tasks, I don't know. I seem to still get my coding fix when the tools can't achieve something or when I simply don't want to use them. But, there's certainly a new area to learn. I doesn't matter the tool you use, or even if you use those tool, learning how to specify a problem, and breakdown a solution is at the root at what we do as developers. Writing the code should only be the last part of the job.
I guess the only good thing about this Heroku outage is that I remembered Twitter/X existed 🤣
How is everything going on here?
Do you know what, outages happen. And I feel for the @heroku devops right now. But, the lack of communication is a real killer here.
Right, first time properly integrating AI on large scale in our app.
Current state of our proof of concept is able to understand our data structure and generate multi step queries to answer complex questions based on résident state and wellbeing.
Still in development, but I feel this will unlock so much potential for our customers!
Fuck it, I said I would do it. It's Sunday, I'm not drunk, but I'm doing it youtube.com/watch?v=_B5NtDHI…
The next 90 days are gonna be .... interesting. But I guess you should always do shit that puts you out of your comfort zone to grow.