Bitsy
Real-world experience distilled into actionable insights for software engineers aspiring to get the most out of their careers – once a week.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 9
- Latest publication
- Sep 26, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest issues
Why a handful of engineers will beat your agent fleet (opens the original)
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Motivated, capable engineers with a deep understanding of the business will always out-ship meat proxies1 and create a superior product.If you are new here, I’m , a principal engineer. I write Bitsy, the newsletter you are reading. I’ve also written a few books on React and built several apps. I use agents as coworkers, not as a replacement for thinking. I post on X at @akoskm.Some AI-powered startups do the oppo
We went from human slop to AI slop. That’s fine. (opens the original)
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AI-written code isn’t a new species of bad code.It’s your average engineer’s code created at higher volume.This is a boring conclusion I’ve been thinking about for some time. It won’t get you any clicks. It doesn’t imply AI will take your job or that abundance is next quarter. So you likely won’t read conclusions like this.But I think the bottleneck was never “can the model write this”.It was: “can your team absorb more average producers?”This is how the thing in front of me feels.Unglamorous. S
Agentic coding is boring if you only write code (opens the original)
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A game beyond the game.The games I had the most fun with always had metagames.In World of Warcraft, the core game is simple:Your character attacks mobs, the bad guys. Mobs die, give you XP, and some loot.You fight mobs at your level or slightly above to level up and beat stronger mobs.Repeat 2. Until you get to lvl80, which was the maximum level back then.If you told anyone this is how you play WoW, they’d think something’s wrong with you.WoW
The skill that outlasts coding (opens the original)
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Using AI to write code is the easy part.Building the system that writes the code is the job.A coworker scheduled a “Daily use of AI” meeting a couple of days ago.I thought we were going to talk tools. Claude Enterprise, Opus, agents, how SpaceX employees deploy 100 agents to ship 20 PRs overnight. The usual. 🤓But the convo between the lines turned into something else: where does the human still belong in all this?Discussions like this are happening all around the world now.We’re still trying to
Time-to-market vs time-to-regret (opens the original)
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A decade ago, when my wife and I realised we couldn’t get ahead with the salaries we had, I started freelancing.I applied to as many projects as I could, respecting the deadlines and the fact that I still had my full-time job.But one day I messed up.I applied to two projects, both with a short time to complete. It was the equivalent of same-day delivery.For one, I already worked on the solution, and it was close to completion. The other I didn’t even start. To make things worse, I got the email
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