Essays on AI, software and the shape of technical work, by Cesaire Tobias.
Essays on AI, software and the shape of technical work.
The cloud has come apart into components. When a production stack needs no hyperscaler console, the question stops being whether you can run it and becomes which option to choose.
(June 2, 2026)
The em-dash, the tripled list, the careful hedging: the tells people read as machine fingerprints were learned from us. On whose writing gets smoothed out, and who gets accused.
(May 4, 2026)
AI is held to a standard humans are not, and the usual defence is that fallibility comes with human-likeness. That premise does not survive contact with how we already judge each other.
(May 4, 2026)
An AI code review returned 27 findings. Asking how many were left to find turned out to be the more useful question, and the harder one to answer.
(May 4, 2026)
A surgeon asked how a phone does what a mainframe once did. It mostly doesn’t; it’s a frontend. Computing keeps swinging between central and local, and the swing has a pattern.
(March 20, 2026)
Rebuilding a developer machine is dozens of tools, hundreds of packages and the one environment variable you always forget. I handed the migration to Claude Code instead.
(February 11, 2026)
A follow-up on proprietary languages: if AI can write in any of them, what actually decides which languages survive, and what that means for the ones people learn first.
(December 12, 2025)
Open source won on trust and access long before AI. What AI changes is the last argument for paying: the cost of knowing the language.
(September 11, 2025)