I just listened to a Search Engine episode about Waymo and driverless cars (The Trial of the Driverless Car), and it made me so angry. Not at Waymo, though. There has always been tension between people who do a job and the companies trying to mechanize or automate the job, but all of these people have been arguing about the wrong thing… And they’ve been doing it for 200 years.

Perhaps you are aware of the popular fast-casual salad shop called Sweetgreen. They’re a semi-iconic brand here in Boston, and I’ve eaten a metric shit ton of their salads. They’re delicious!

Yesterday, I walked into a Sweetgreen here in my town in the Boston suburbs—a location I’d never been in and quite honestly didn’t know was there—and I was shocked by what I saw. Instead of a counter with several friendly employees behind it making salads to order, I saw iPad ordering tablets and two guys silently packing bowls. Silently.

Moreover, it seemed like all they were doing was putting dressing on these salads. Where were they coming from? Who was making them? Why weren’t they talking?

Friends, the reverse centaur has come for our salads.

Yes, this is a post about Google Antigravity. It’s not about Wicked. But if you want to listen to that while you read this, that’s fine by me.

Yesterday I tried out this new AI-centric IDE from Google and I have… Thoughts. This will be a mostly unstructured sequence of experiences and opinions, so if you are looking for something well-researched I’m sure there are 1,000 other blogs you could read.

Our bucket overflows with news about the exploits of “vibe coding,” and journalists are now (apparently) paid by how many times they can fit the word “agentic” into a piece, because no other explanation makes sense to me.

As I’ve written before (somewhere, maybe not here), I use AI and I like AI and I think we’ll come out the other end of this with some really interesting and useful new stuff, but at the moment it feels like the hype machine has shifted into overdrive.

I can’t shake the feeling that in some ways, we’ve seen this before… With Ruby on Rails.

The enshittification of the tech industry is reaching a fever pitch, and it’s all thanks to AI. Not what AI can do, but what people seem to think it can do.

It’s really hard to get a job in tech right now. Surely our industry has gone through its ups and downs and hiring waxes and wanes alongside interest rates and how sweaty the many perpetually damp men in the Silicon Valley VC scene are on a given day. But things are getting rough out there, friends.