Recent content in Home on John Wang
Yesterday, Anthropic announced that they had started watermarking AI-generated content. Folks across the internet were particularly up in arms about it (I think rightfully so), especially because this apparently is happening to all Claude models whether or not you are in the EU. I wanted to investigate what they’re actually doing and whether it’s perceptible or changeable. Anthropic…
The best person to understand a problem really deeply usually isn’t an engineer, it’s usually someone who’s using the product day in and day out with customers. Or it’s the customer support person who sees questions all day about why a particular feature isn’t working. While engineers have historically been the only people who could fix things, that’s not true…
In a world where AI writes more and more of the code, is it crazy to still want to be a software engineer? My answer is no. I think there will still be a reasonably large number of engineers in the future, and some of them will be incredibly well paid. I’m not necessarily saying there will be more of them than there are today. But if you’re an engineer (or whatever the future version…
I’ve been thinking about time lately, especially how much of it is available. The strange thing I keep coming back to is that life feels both incredibly long and incredibly short at the same time, depending on which angle you look at it from. Both things can be true at the same time. It reminds me of the coastline paradox: a coastline wraps around a perfectly finite patch of land, yet the…
I’ve heard of a lot of teams recently starting to use number of tokens as the key metric by which they measure their engineering team. It’s actually kind of funny that I even feel the need to write this blog post, but I did want to get it on record: I think it’s a bad metric if it’s your primary north star. Should it be one of many metrics that you use to understand how…
I think there’s pretty clearly a divide in AI perception between executives and individual contributors (ICs). Executives seem to love it and evangelize it (going so far as to creating mandates at their companies for AI usage). But ICs are typically much more skeptical of its usage. You can see the divide show up everywhere from Hacker News comment threads to internal Slack debates about adopting…
Mamba-3 just dropped yesterday. It’s a big milestone towards unseating the stranglehold that transformers have on the modern AI industry. Mamba-3 is a state space model, and it’s fascinating because it uses an entirely different architecture from transformers (the tech that the big LLMs like Opus 4.6, GPT 5.4, Gemini 3, etc. are based on). Transformers keep a huge memory layer called…
I sometimes cringe at sharing my opinions (who cares about my opinions anyways), but I keep these around because back in college a similar “Opinions” section actually started some awesome conversations, so maybe it will in the future too. (These previously lived on a standalone page of this site — the first four date to October 2023, and the last was added in November 2025.) Stay…
2026-08-12 How Claude’s watermarking (probably) works 2026-08-07 Code review bottlenecks: How we hill climbed our way to higher PR throughput 2026-06-30 Why we built 143 2026-05-31 Cheap software won’t make engineering cheap 2026-05-29 Time 2026-05-06 Number of tokens shouldn’t be the only metric 2026-03-27 Why are executives enamored with AI but ICs aren’t? 2026-03-21…
Most of my woodworking creations can be found on doveandtail.com.
Here’s some of the stuff that I’ve worked on: Open source software 143.dev. Open source coding agent infrastructure we built at Assembled to help teams use agents for real product work. It gives teams shared automations, integrations, code review workflows, and reusable environments so engineers and non-engineers can fix issues closer to where they find them. Quickselect. A Golang…