Ai

I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There’s a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind. ...

As AI generated content becomes the norm, I believe that human-generated content and raw thoughts and emotion will become more valuable. In many ways, I’d rather read a raw, unproduced, and scrappy blog post with grammatical mistakes over perfectly generated content that serves little value. – Armeet Singh Jatyani, Importance of Writing

AI can replace most of programming, but programming isn’t the job. Programming is a task. It’s one of many things you do as part of your work. But if you’re a software engineer, your actual job is more than typing code into an editor. The mistake people make is conflating the task with the role. It’s like saying calculators replaced accountants. Calculators automated arithmetic, but arithmetic was never the job. The job was understanding financials, advising clients, making judgment calls, etc. The calculator just made accountants faster at the mechanical part. AI is doing something similar for us. ...

I presented a session at the .NET Conference Italia 2025 in Milan a couple of weeks ago. The title was “Integrating our applications with LLMs and AI via MCP Servers”. It was well received; there were good questions throughout the talk and in the hall afterward. Surprisingly, live coding and demos went relatively smoothly. The fine guys at ASP Italia just published the video in case someone is interested. Yeah, it is in Italian. I got a transcript from MacWhisper and then asked Claude to translate and clean it up. It did a pretty good job, so let me know if there’s any interest in an English transcript; I might post it here. ...

I’m just back from reading the transcript of Beyond the Machine, a thoughtful and insightful talk by Frank Chimero. I’m trying to figure out how to use generative AI as a designer without feeling like shit. I am fascinated with what it can do, impressed and repulsed by what it makes, and distrustful of its owners. I am deeply ambivalent about it all. The believers demand devotion, the critics demand abstinence, and to see AI as just another technology is to be a heretic twice over. Today, I’d like to try to open things up a bit. ...

The most recent project I worked on is Invoicetronic, a modern API for complete management of the electronic invoicing cycle in Italy (FatturaPA/SDI). We had long used an internal API by our accounting software, which was also utilized by thousands of our end users. We decided to make our experience and expertise available to external developers, allowing them to integrate electronic invoicing into their applications quickly via a public API. Thus, the Invoicetronic project was born. ...

The old timers who built the early web are coding with AI like it’s 1995. Think about it: They gave blockchain the sniff test and walked away. Ignored crypto (and yeah, we’re not rich now). NFTs got a collective eye roll. But AI? Different story. The same folks who hand-coded HTML while listening to dial-up modems sing are now vibe-coding with the kids. Building things. Breaking things. Giddy about it. ...

Everyone’s either panicking that AI will replace them or assuming they don’t need to learn anything anymore. Both miss the point entirely. AI amplifies what you already know. If you understand distributed systems, you’ll use AI to build better ones. If you don’t, you’ll use AI to create distributed disasters. The difference? When that AI-generated code breaks in production — and it will — you need to know why. When it doesn’t scale — and it won’t — you need to understand the bottlenecks. When it creates race conditions, memory leaks, or architectural nightmares, GitHub Copilot won’t save you. Your fundamentals will. ...

On Thursday, I will be conducting an MCP Server session at the Summer AI Afternoon event organized by DevMarche in collaboration with DevRomagna, the neighbouring development communities. There are more than 50 people signed up already, and I’m so looking forward to meeting old and new friends down South.

The biggest news in tech this week (which isn’t over yet) is, without a doubt, that Cloudflare is about to introduce a pay-per-crawl model for AI bots—huge in many ways, as let’s not forget that approximately 20% of internet traffic is routed through Cloudflare. I have many thoughts right now, and it will take some time for them to settle. A good analysis and explanation of why this move is needed and is a good first step can be found in yesterday’s article by Dries Buytaert’s, The Web’s Broken Deal with AI Companies, which I recommend everyone read. ...