Independent notes on engineering and organizations

Software, AI & People

Long-form essays on software engineering, artificial intelligence, organizations, and people

An engineer designs a software environment shared by human teams and AI tools
Latest essay Revisiting Peopleware: The Better AI Gets, the More Software Depends on People

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Revisiting Peopleware: The Better AI Gets, the More Software Depends on People

Software Engineering · A fresh reading of Peopleware for the age of coding agents: when code is abundant, attention, trust, judgment, and shared responsibility become the scarce resources.

Rereading The Mythical Man-Month: Software Engineering in the Age of AI

Software Engineering · A rereading of The Mythical Man-Month for the age of coding agents, context engineering, and knowledge-driven software development.

Reliability by Design: What AI Still Misses in Production Systems

Software Engineering · AI can generate complete features quickly, but it rarely designs the failure path by default. A practical framework for critical flows, fault boundaries, idempotency, observability, and recovery.

How Should a Programmer Measure a Year?

Organizations · An essay first written in April 2018 about measuring an engineer’s growth beyond promotion—through craft, influence, judgment, responsibility, and sustained learning.

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About

I’m Rocky Yu. I write about software engineering, AI, and how people and organizations build systems that work in the real world.