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The strangest thing about AI coding tools is how quickly they make you feel productive. You type a request, watch several files appear, and suddenly there is a login page, a database connection and a button with a tasteful blue gradient. Ten minutes earlier you had an empty folder. Now the terminal is scrolling like…
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I noticed I had stopped opening search results. Not completely. For train bookings or café hours, I still clicked. But for ordinary questions—how to fix a Gmail filter, which USB-C cable I needed, whether a strange Windows process was normal—I had started reading the AI answer and moving on. It felt efficient. It also felt…
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A few years ago, I watched a team spend nearly an hour proving that their system was healthy. CPU usage looked normal. Memory was fine. The database was responding. Every dashboard was green. Meanwhile, customers couldn’t complete payments. The problem eventually turned out to be a small change in the way one service passed an…
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Here’s a painfully ordinary story. Someone uses the same password for Gmail, Netflix, LinkedIn and a shopping site they forgot about years ago. It’s a decent password, by normal human standards. It has a capital letter, a number and one of those exclamation marks websites keep requesting as if punctuation can defeat crime. Then the…
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The easiest way to spot fake DevOps is to watch what happens after a bad release. The deployment finishes. Customers begin reporting errors. Slack fills with screenshots. Then somebody says, “The pipeline passed, so this must be an operations issue.” There it is. A company can have Kubernetes, Terraform, automated tests and enough dashboards to…
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I have a small graveyard of AI accounts. There’s one tool I joined because it promised to organise every thought I had. Another was supposed to turn meetings into “actionable intelligence,” which is an impressive phrase for writing down who agreed to send the spreadsheet. A third could generate presentations, websites and social posts. I…
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A laptop disconnected from Wi-Fi used to become noticeably less clever. Email stopped. Cloud documents complained. Search disappeared. AI tools, especially, became blank boxes waiting for a network connection. That is changing faster than I expected. Phones and laptops are increasingly able to run useful AI models directly on the device. Not the biggest models…
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Vector databases have become one of those technologies people add to project diagrams before they have a project. The pitch is seductive. Your AI assistant will understand company documents, find the right paragraph instantly and answer questions like a colleague who has read every Slack thread since 2019. So the team creates embeddings, opens an…
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I once watched two developers spend twenty minutes arguing with a merge conflict that involved four lines of code. Not four hundred. Four. One person had renamed a button. The other had changed what happened when it was clicked. Git displayed the usual brackets and arrows, both developers sighed, and someone in Slack posted the…
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Docker confused me for longer than I like to admit. I understood the words individually. Image. Container. Volume. Port. None sounded difficult. Put them together in a terminal command, though, and it felt like operating rented machinery without the paperwork. Then I joined a small project where setup took most of an afternoon. The app…