Thoughts on The Code Mercenary — Notes from the hired hand

The tailor who ruins the trousers

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Anyone can return something bad. Nobody can return something good that was ruined for them.

That second one has a particular shape, and it happens at the alterations bench.

The trousers were fine

I bought a few pairs recently from a shop I rate. The cloth is good, the construction honest, the finish clean, and they drape the way a trouser should. Somebody in that chain knew what they were doing and cared enough to do it properly. You can feel it the moment you put them on.

What bespoke shoes can teach us about AI

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 05:17:00 +0000

I bought a pair of leather shoes recently. Nothing experimental, nothing trendy. Just beautifully made.

What caught me was not the brand or the price. It was the restraint. The stitching, the finish, the choices somebody had clearly made about what mattered and what did not. That is not a template being filled in.

The moment stayed with me longer than I expected, because of what I had been reading all week at work. AI generated code. Lots of it. Code that worked and still felt heavy.

Treat your engineers as creatives

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:32:00 +0000

I came to software from music productionDifferent instruments. Same discipline: listen, cut, repeat. . It taught me one thing early and I have never managed to unlearn it.

You are making something either way. Software just comes with more rules about how.

Predictability has a price

Treat engineers like checklist machines and you buy predictability. You pay for it with invention.

Every clean interface, every system that holds up under load, started as somebody's idea. The craft is shaping that idea into a form other people can live with. You cannot task manage that into existence. You can only leave room for it.