The Homework Machine
A short story by Gianni Rodari, translated from Italian. A travelling salesman offers a machine that does all your homework. The price is your brain.
Alessandro Rodi’s Blog
This is Alessandro Rodi's blog and website. Here you can find my thoughts and findings.
Latest posts
An open letter to Renuo: our approach to AI
An open letter I sent to everyone at Renuo about how AI is reshaping our profession, why software engineering matters more than ever, and why quality for our clients is non-negotiable.
Rendering Markdown from Rails
Serving the same URL as HTML to humans and Markdown to LLMs sounds trivial: until Rails' content negotiation gets in the way.
The last two years with AI tools: what changed, what didn’t
After a year of AI-assisted development at a real web agency: what genuinely helps, what's overhyped, and why software engineering matters more than ever.
Iterating with AI: How a PDF compression feature evolved through 8 revisions
A real-world example of building a feature with Claude Code. The AI produced working code on the first attempt, but it took 8 rounds of feedback to shape it into something I was happy with.
How AI helped me prepare for my son’s rare disease diagnosis
When my four-year-old was diagnosed with Coats disease, AI didn't replace the doctors — but it made me a much better prepared parent.
From 3 queries to 1 with Rails upsert
How I replaced a find_or_create_by + lock + update_columns pattern with a single upsert call.
N+1 queries: counter_cache and the alternative
When counter_cache helps with N+1 queries, when it lies to you, and a cache-free alternative worth knowing.
Latency simulation
A little script to simulate network latency when developing locally
My source of information
A list of my favourite Newsletters and other sources of information