Engineering Mindset

I was recently reading a Wall Street Journal article, and one sentence in it reminded me of Jack Welch, the CEO of GE from the 1980s to 2001, roughly 20 years at the top. I want to talk about that, because I think there is a real connection between what happened at GE and what is happening right now with AI coding agents and vibe coding. The article was titled The AI Superstars Who Say a ‘Vibe Slop’ Crisis Is Coming, and it argues that vibe coding is generating code we cannot really trust. As of now, I agree. ...

Every month, another big tech company announces layoffs. And every time, the same keyword shows up in the headlines: AI. But the real reason is much simpler than that. The Pattern Nobody Questions If you follow tech news, you notice the same story on repeat. Every layoff announcement is tied to AI. “AI is replacing jobs.” “AI made these roles redundant.” The narrative is always the same. Recently, Block – founded by Jack Dorsey, also the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter – was one of those companies. Same story, same keyword. ...

Imagine you’re a CTO at a company with a government contract. Your product runs on Claude from Anthropic. Monday morning, you get a call: Claude is banned from all government systems. Now what? Two Very Different Mornings If you built your AI layer as a plug-and-play abstraction, you’re annoyed, but you’re fine. You swap the provider, run your regression tests, push to staging, move to prod. That’s it. A day’s work. Maybe two. ...

Sam Altman recently said something that caught my attention: “Don’t learn to code.” Instead, he says, learn high agency, soft skills, and idea generation. I think he’s half right—and half dangerously wrong. Yes, high agency, soft skills, and idea generation matter. They mattered before the LLM era, and they still matter now. No argument there. But telling people to stop learning to code? That is the most dangerous advice in tech right now. ...

“So, what kind of engineer are you?” “I’m a Python engineer.” Every time I hear this, I cringe a little. Not because Python isn’t amazing—it absolutely is. But because somewhere along the way, we’ve started defining ourselves by our tools instead of our craft. I’m sure you’ve heard it too: “I am an AWS engineer,” “I am a React developer,” as if the tool has become their entire professional identity. ...