As long as software engineering is done in teams, we need a way for people to know how things work, why certain decisions were made and where the boundaries are. That need doesn’t go away when AI writes the code. If anything, it gets more critical.

Code reviews were how most teams handled this. When someone reviewed your PR, they didn’t just check for bugs; they absorbed context. They learned…

I picked up a term that I have not used in all my years of programming, and I love it:

“Drift”.

As in “Specificaiton Drift”: you write the spec at time _T_ , implement at _T+1_ , learn something new about the problem domain in the process and adjust your implementation (you know, normal programming) at _T+2_ , then at _T+3_ the spec doesn’t reflect the reality of the code base anymore.

But…

Struggles against oppression start with people critically reflecting on their experiences. What happens to such struggles when we outsource our thinking to AI and replace human interlocutors with sycophantic chatbots?

With the emergence of chatbots, the outsourcing of thinking — and therefore also the critical questioning of existing social norms and power relations — is taking a new…