14 Feb 2026 #writing
At times, writing (or creating anything) can feel pointless.
We don’t see results or traction. That’s when we should think we’re writing for our past selves, documenting our journey, or creating a time capsule.
But these days, my scrolling led me to How to Make a Living as an Artist. A street artist wrote it for other artists. But the next line captures the essence of writing or any other creative pursuit:
If you make something that you like, at least one person will like it — you. If you make something you think other people will like, you run the risk of no one liking it at all. That would be sad.
Write what you’d read. Code the app you’d use. Paint what you’d hang in your living room. At least one person will like it. That’s enough.
13 Feb 2026 #mondaylinks
Hey there.
Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. When coding was the bottleneck, we used 2-pizza teams. Now, with AI writing decent code, we have to rethink team organization. AI is turning teams into 1-pizza teams (7min) while creating new roles.
#2. Most of us coders are problem solvers at heart. The worst part is that makes us addicted to being useful (6min).
#3. We are at a turning point of our career as coders (5min). Software’s first “season” is over. But the next one will be “more interesting, more economically valuable, and more mentally stimulating than we can imagine right now.”
#4. Anthropic found that over-relying on AI leads to a “statistically significant decrease in mastery.” A truth everybody already knows (2min).
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about the stats that deflate the AI hype (2min) (more revealing that Anthropic’s study) and how I’m embracing boredom (3min) (My phone screen time was quite shocking).
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Street-Smart Coding, 30 lessons to help you code like a pro. From Googling to clear communication, it covers the lessons you don’t learn in tutorials. It’s now out on Kindle and paperback on Amazon.
Until next Friday. Keep coding smartly
Cesar
12 Feb 2026 #coding
In the days of StackOverflow, we had to verify answers. Now, too often, we accept AI’s output without question.
Catching AI red-handed
Today, in another adventure with AI, I asked Copilot to turn a couple of SQL table definitions into mapping classes for Entity Framework Core. It was the classical 1-to-many relationship.
The problem came when I asked it to generate an API endpoint to store a parent record with a bunch of child records. Something like: create a parent record, then read a table to create its children.
Its first solution was to persist the parent record. Then inside a loop, persist every child record. The classical N+1 problem. Well, the inverse one. Arrggg!
When I prompted it to change it, saying there was no need for the loop, it replied with a “Yes, you can simplify it that way.” Caught you Copilot!
Why coding skills still matter
The N+1 problem was something I could find on the spot.
Now imagine how many AI answers we blindly accept without question. When coding, documenting, researching, testing…
Coding skills still matter. Without them, we wouldn’t even notice the problem.
Blindly trusting AI is what makes us say AI kills CS degrees, what makes us dangerously lazy.
Reviewing the code AI spits out puts in the top 50% of coders. The other 50% don’t always review. You need your coding muscles for that.
AI is like a semi-autonomous car. It always needs hands on the wheel. Build skills. Then leverage AI.
To help you build hype-proof skills, I wrote Street-Smart Coding. Because syntax alone won’t make you stand out.
11 Feb 2026 #misc
Even on a phone reduction diet, and even using social media consciously, I found myself wondering what to write next. I had too much on my mind.
To offload my mind, here’s a single-take brain dump of random ideas I’ve found recently:
#1. Nothing can’t be done by thinking alone. That’s a line I found in Secrets to Thrive in Life, a book my mom annotated and left behind.
#2. Don’t network. Write instead. Your words have wider reach than a networking activity or event. Someone shared in Medium.
#3. A fit, shredded body is a status symbol. A fancy house, car, and watch can be financed, but not a healthy body. Allegedly Arnold Schwarzenegger.
#4. The bigger the project, the strongest the Resistance. Resistance being the personification of doubt, procrastination, and self-sabotage. From the one and only, Steven Pressfield.
#5. When stressed/anxious/overwhelm, create. Someone else in Medium.
#6. You don’t owe the Internet consistency. It’s OK to disappear from social media. A creator I follow in LinkedIn.
#7. Journaling can be as simple as writing one line a day. Ryan Holiday from his YouTube channel.
10 Feb 2026 #coding
Vibecoding was bad. But now, AI-assisted coding seems fine.
Nothing sparks more heated discussions than asking coders about best practices. Today, someone I follow on LinkedIn shared his weekend AI experiment to build an app. As usual, “passionate” coders threw virtual stones.
To turn the conversation around, he asked for our unpopular opinions about AI-assisted coding. To avoid burying mine in a comment, here they are:
#1. Use AI as a calculator. Only useful if you know what you’re doing.
#2. Don’t let AI touch code directly. That’s my go-to rule for coding with AI. Unproductive? Maybe. But it forces me to decompose problems and validates AI-generated code.
#3. Use AI for opposite tasks. This is my most recent rule:
If I write code, AI reviews it. If AI generates it, I review it.
According to a recent Sonar survey, only 48% of respondents always check AI-assisted code before committing. #yolo By reviewing, I’m already in the top 50%.
#4. AI is like a semi-autonomous car. You trust it to steer, but you never take your hand off the wheel. Otherwise, AI could be a sloppy coder with bad memory.
AI alone won’t make you a great coder. It only amplifies the skills you already have. That’s why I wrote Street-Smart Coding—because you need more than syntax to stand out.