Rat’s Skills: Making Friends and Betraying Them
The path to promotion is not competence but a learnable set of parasitic "rat" behaviors, and here is the concrete skill-set that produces the climb.
Yegor Bugayenko
Yegor Bugayenko
Latest posts
Don’t Blame the Wheel for Missing a Turn
Holding ordinary employees accountable for business-wide results they cannot control is unfair and demotivating.
Help the Agent to Feel
Claude Code programs better than me but with no taste, so I train it to feel my sense of code beauty through a CLAUDE.md manifesto and custom style checkers.
Monotonic Indentation
Between two adjacent lines, indentation may grow by one unit only, but may shrink by any number of units — a rule that resolves most code formatting disputes.
Couriers, Not Coders
Now that AI codes for cents, contributors are paid for the delivery, not the code—so no mercy for sloppy pull requests anymore.
Fast Software: More Programmers, Not Fewer
AI coding agents will make software disposable, like fast fashion replaced tailored clothing, creating demand for more programmers, not fewer.
SPAs Are a Performance Dead End
Single Page Applications, once a solution for slow browsers, are now a performance bottleneck due to multiple HTTP round-trips.
Comments Considered Harmful in the Age of LLMs
Instead of writing code comments that decay and mislead, let LLMs generate documentation on-demand and fail the build when code is too obscure for them to explain.
The Fall of JavaScript
JavaScript was an elegant prototype-based class-free language until TypeScript and ES6 classes ruined it.
You Are the Low-Hanging Fruit
Sales reps and programmers can either fight external obstacles to earn their pay, or convince you, the founder, to pay for their time regardless of results; make the internal path harder.