What happens when an AI burns out
A Claude session ran for two days, stopped listening and got my hand-written code backwards. So I took it off the job, and asked for a proper handover first.
Tags
10 pages
Leadership
Management was never a promotion
Management and engineering are two sides of the same coin, and far too many companies forget the engineering side has no cap.
A terrible lead to an AI junior
I'd built this exact thing by hand, years ago, pixel perfect. So why was I sitting here shouting at a screen while a machine got it wrong three times?
A Slack channel with nobody in it
I asked nine agent sessions to stop compiling for forty minutes. What came back read like a team of colleagues, and I haven't worked out what to do about that.
Which one needs me next
A dozen agent sessions running at once is not a capacity problem. Working out which of them is stuck is, and the obvious way to find out is the wrong one.
Who owns the pager?
The hard part of on-call is not fixing broken systems at three in the morning. It is an employer borrowing a life it does not pay for.
The feature your users are already faking
The one real user of my photo tool was already faking a feature with a workaround. That workaround was the specification.
What burnout taught me (more than once)
Burned out more than once across twenty years, and the point is that none of them looked the same as the one before it.
The rung we sawed off
The junior developer pipeline is collapsing, and the cause is not the thing everyone is blaming. Who is left when the greybeards retire.
The greybeards' edge was never typing
Agentic AI gives senior engineers a lift and juniors a drag, which tempts firms to automate away the entry level entirely.
