Fear and Loathing in the Software Community
LLMs will change software development, it won't eliminate it. New business opportunities will emerge, just like they did with web and mobile. Keep your head up, fellow developers!
Elia Insider
Inside the brain of a software company founder.
Latest posts
What Claude Code Changed — and Didn’t Change — in My Development Process
Over the past few years I’ve had the opportunity to observe a lot of AI-assisted software development. In my experience there was a clear shift in November 2025 when Claude Opus 4.5 launched. What we can trust AI systems to do changed materially. While I have a day job managing a few teams and little [ ]
AI Didn’t Cause Layoffs. Incentives Did.
Tech layoffs are not primarily an AI story. They’re a capital cycle story. After a decade of cheap money and aggressive hiring, companies are normalizing headcount and framing it as AI-driven efficiency. The incentives favor a forward-looking narrative. Sometimes it isn’t automation. It’s just math.
Software-in-the-Middle: When Software Becomes the Customer
The evolution of software development has transitioned from straightforward, human-driven applications to a complex architecture where applications operate independently via APIs. The rise of microservices and platforms like Stripe and Twilio exemplifies this shift towards "software-in-the-middle," enabling services to communicate without direct human interaction. AI advancements are poised to…
Bad LLM Code, 4,000 Lines or Less
I didn’t get bad code because an LLM can’t write software. I got bad code because I gave it too much freedom. I was working on a new feature for TrueMath this past week. I’d already written it before, but it lived behind an admin wall, and I wanted to elevate it for customers. The [ ]