Notes

AI Coding Agents are not capable enough to build a delightful experience for end users. They just spit out code and lack that human touch.

When building for humans, the core aspect to earn their trust is care. Care is a human trait and nothing will be able to take that away from us.

The positive side to using the Coding Agents:

A few years ago, when I tried building some products as a side project, being a backend developer, I struggled with frontend. Got overwhelmed with what JavaScript library to learn — React, Angular, Vue, Next — instead of focusing on the build.

Now the Coding Agents can write the frontend for me. And I can focus on what really matters — building a delightful experience for my users.

Whether you are a backend, frontend, full stack, mobile, or an AI engineer, don’t forget to put that human touch of “care” in your work. That will drive you to be better, to grow, not only in your career, but also in your life.

Care is both a deliberate action and an emotion so strong no AI model or harness will be able to capture it.

When building a product, do not wait for others to find basic issues, least of all the customer. Don’t leave them for your team to clean up either. Build it, own it, and validate it.

Here is a simple routine I follow:

Build the “happy path” toward the end of the day. End your day on a high note, confident that you have built a world-class feature, and get a solid 7 - 8 hours of sleep.

The next morning, wake up and step entirely into the shoes of your user. If you encounter an annoying experience, do not worry, your builder persona is there to fix it.

The more effectively you can switch between these personas, the better the final product experience will be. Your user persona must never carry the biases of your builder persona.

There is something appealing about still watching tutorial videos or reading documentation where the steps being performed have an explanation of what we are doing and why we are doing it.

Coding agents may have made it faster to set up and execute, but suddenly you will see that your solution is using a webhook and you have no idea why.

This adds a comprehension debt, and you can’t optimise or scale a system that you do not understand.

A good strategy is to offload but be curious to learn. Get your solution to work first. You also can’t optimise or scale a solution that does not work.

When I was young in my software engineering career, I thought writing good, bug-free code was the most important thing that made a business run.

With time, I realized building great systems that scale is what actually matters more.

Then as a senior engineer and mentor, I learned that building a great team and helping them ship fast is the ultimate driver of business growth.

But when I stepped into building my own business, I now understand that sales is what creates and sustains a business so the engineers can get to write good code, build scalable systems, and build great teams.

The person you are when no one is watching is the real you.

Do hard things when no one is watching.

For thousands of years, human brains evolved to handle hard things and problems requiring full attention.

When all difficulty is removed, our brain does not relax but instead panics, searches for non-existent threats, and creates anxiety.

Staying on track is easy when you’re having a good day. Bad days? That’s when discipline feels like punishment.

When too many projects need attention at once. When multiple fires hit simultaneously. Most people abandon their routine to firefight. They justify breaking commitments to “survive.”

Pushing through this pain line is where you get growth. That’s how you know you’re committed to something beyond comfort.