The $500K Engineer Who Isn’t Burning Tokens Is Leaving Money on the Table There’s a quote circulating right now that stopped me mid-scroll: “If your $500K engineer isn’t burning at least $250K in tokens, something is wrong.” Sunny Madra posted it this week and the reactions were split almost perfectly between people who got it…
The $500K Engineer and the $250K Token Bill “If your $500K engineer isn’t burning at least $250K in tokens, something is wrong.” That quote, posted by Sunny Madra on X earlier this week, has been living rent-free in my head. My first reaction was to roll my eyes. My second reaction was to realize I…
The Indispensable Engineer Trap (And Why I Walked Right Into It) For most of my early career, I optimized for the wrong thing. I made myself the person who knew where all the bodies were buried. The one who understood the legacy pipeline no one else had touched in three years. The one you called…
The Hardest Skill in AI Engineering Is Knowing When to Stop I’ve been sitting with a uncomfortable observation for a few months now. We’ve crossed some kind of threshold in AI tooling where the answer to “can an agent do this?” is almost always yes. The models are capable enough, the frameworks are mature enough,…
Most AI engineers I know are solving the wrong problem. We obsess over model quality. Benchmark scores. Parameter counts. Token speeds. And I get it — these things feel concrete. They are measurable. You can point to a number going up and feel like you made progress. But the actual bottleneck in most production AI…
40.9K Stars and a “Junior Engineer With Poor Taste” — What the Superpowers Repo Is Really Telling Us A GitHub repository called Superpowers just crossed 40.9K stars, and I think it’s one of the more honest signals we’ve gotten about where AI coding agents actually stand right now. Not from a benchmark. Not from a…
Karpathy Just Scored Your Job. Software Engineers Got an 8.5. Here’s What That Actually Means. Andrej Karpathy built a tool that scraped all 342 occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fed each one to an LLM with a detailed scoring rubric, and produced an AI exposure score from 0 to 10. Software developers landed…
The Parallel Sessions Gap: Why Boris Cherny’s Workflow Reveals the Real AI Productivity Divide There is a version of AI-assisted development where you open one chat window, type a question, wait, copy some code, and close the tab. A lot of developers are still living there. Then there is Boris Cherny’s version, where 10 to…
AI Is Not Your Search Engine. It’s Your Thinking Partner. But Only If You Let It. There’s a loneliness problem in AI development that nobody wants to admit exists. Not the philosophical kind. The practical, 11pm-debugging-an-agentic-workflow kind. Your teammates are asleep. Slack is quiet. Stack Overflow has never seen your exact edge case. You’re staring…
The Skill That Will Separate Good Agentic Engineers From Great Ones Everyone is debating which model to run, which framework to wrap it in, which IDE plugin to install. Those are real decisions. But after watching a lot of agentic projects stall out, I’m convinced the actual bottleneck is upstream of all of them. It’s…
