The Pragmatic Engineer

Paul Ford wrote a great piece about this in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/ai-software.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NFA.UkLv.r-XczfzYRdXJ&smid=url-share

> November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.

Max Woolf is a good one: https://minimaxir.com/2026/02/ai-agent-coding/

> The real annoying thing about Opus 4.6/Codex 5.3 is that it’s impossible to publicly say “Opus 4.5 (and the models that came after it) are an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it” without sounding like an AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it’s the counterintuitive truth to my personal frustration. [...] A year ago, I was one of those skeptics who was very suspicious of the agentic hype.

DHH - https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/dhhs-new-way-of-writing-code

> Six months ago, in an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, David shared how he doesn’t use AI tools to write code: he types out all his code. But things have changed a lot since then.

> In this episode, we discuss his approach to building software, how it’s changed in the last six months, and why he now takes an agent-first approach, and how he barely writes any code by hand.

Linus Torvalds, two weeks ago (though I don't have…

I've been in a similar position, a couple times in my career. I think its a natural trap to fall into when you are the kind of person that is good at bootstrapping projects to the point where they need a team to grow further, but not interested in management.

A newsletter article (not mine) that helped crystallize my thinking around this, and helped me to explain it to non-technical folks in my current organization is this one: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-leadership-skillset-overlaps. Unfortunately its pay-walled, but Gergely (author) put some of the content in a tweet thread that is worth reading (https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1473353064358756352). If you look at the venn diagram posted in that thread, it sounds like you fall squarely in the "beware!!" zone.

If you are like me, you fall into that zone, at least in part, because you are clinging to the some technical duties that you could give up, but since they are the foundation of why you enjoy your job, refuse to do so. Understanding this and your own strengths and weaknesses clearly, can really help frame possible solutions for you. I would spend some time reflecting (and it sounds like you already have) about what you want out of this job and your career in general.

Perhaps you can propose to your management that you want to move into more of a "staff engineer" role. This may or may not work, and in the end, depending on the management at your company, you may have to move on to…

It’s not just Latin America. It’s also Canada, most of Europe, it’s India, Asia, and I’m hearing Africa also experiencing a similar pull.

There’s a global talent shortage for experienced people in software engineering, and it’s spilling over everywhere.

Remote work becoming the norm thanks to the pandemic, plus the rise of services like Remote.com, Deel and similar ones is making it much easier to hire remotely in most countries - and hiring outside the US is easier and cheaper: especially when you pay above the local market (but we’ll below the US one).

I’ve been covering this trend from mid 2021 both in my newsletter (The Pragmatic Engineer) and my blog. From all evidence I gathered, we are in the most heated tech hiring market of all time, one that is hotter than during the Dotcom Boom (details in [1]).

Having talked with closer to a hundred tech hiring managers the last six months across all geographies, the consensus is that it will get worse in Q1 2022 than before - and, obviously, this means better for many experienced engineers. And H2 2021 was hot enough with out-of-cycle compensation increases of 5-30% on top of annual raises at many tech companies, across all geographies [2].

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-tech-workers-to-navigate-a-heated-job-market/

[2] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/more-follow-up-hiring-market

My take as a TPM and certified in Scrum: the better and more skilled the team members, the less you need Scrum and other frameworks. Scrum is great for teams composed of new developers who don't yet know how to work together, or teams at companies with poor culture. But the best teams are self-organized and don't necessarily need the guidance of Scrum. As Gergely mentioned, team autonomy is a big factor in job satisfaction (and performance).

But, it can still be worth doing in high performance environments if specific things are needed. Part of being Agile is adapting processes to teams, and some Scrum processes can be useful (relative estimation for example) even when not doing Scrum itself.

As an aside, Gergely has a newsletter[1] (of which this is one of the free articles) that is absolutely fantastic. It's $100/yr IIRC and well worth it. Gergely deep dives into topics around tech including hiring, structure, comp, etc.

Gergely also has a book[2] that helped me get hired in SF when I moved here a couple of years ago.

[1] - https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about
[2] - https://thetechresume.com

When I left high school for college (to pursue engineering) I was quite envious of my friends in the liberal arts - they were assigned papers all the time and I had no outlet for writing (something I enjoyed quite a bit).

I have realized that written/technical communication is a great differentiator.

I journal every day but specifically to your question I would say just start writing.

Knowing your audience is key. I usually include an executive summary section at the top of any design document or product requirements document for a high level view of why people should care. Then I dive into a background or history to give context. At the end of the day it's a narrative and follows similar arcs - just with more direct prose and specific facts. I'll also drop this resource here from the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter. [0]

[0]: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/software-engineering-rfc-and-design

Regarding their point on stacked diffs[0]: they're such a great feature imo and it's a shame GitHub etc don't support the functionality better.

Often I'm working on a set of changes that ultimately have a large code diff. I don't think huge PRs are often a great idea as they introduce more risk, so it's often a good idea to break it up. But a reviewer is not always available to review each bite-sized PR, so you end up with a backlog of PRs that are ugly to review in the GitHub UI and you need to continually rebase them as each is merged.

I quite liked the graphite.dev workflow for this, but it's a bit pricey. That and it only seems to work well if you can get your whole organisation to buy into using it. If GitHub etc integrated it as a native feature, I think that'd be great.

[0]: As mentioned in the article, and https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/stacked-diffs