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Software engineering after code generation stops being the hard part.

Code is cheap now. Judgment is still scarce. Khola.Blog lives in that gap: the invariants a generated diff has to honor, the abstractions that stop paying rent under load, the failure modes that wait politely outside the demo, and the taste that decides what ships. I call it post-human engineering.

Every essay takes one live question from this shift and walks it into production, where retries, locks, migrations, and review queues get a vote. The hype gets audited. So does the doom. You leave with a mechanism you can explain and a rule you can defend in a design review.

I’m a working engineer and I write from that chair: I ship with these tools, I review what they produce, and production has corrected my opinions more than once. If a claim can’t survive contact with a profiler or a postmortem, it doesn’t run.

The archive opens with the classics: CLRS, SICP, Ousterhout, The Pragmatic Programmer, reread as engineering documents and tested against generated code. The books still make cameos. These days the essays start from the work itself.

I write for two readers at once: the engineer living through this shift who wants sharper vocabulary for it, and the one who already read the paper and wants the boundary conditions. Every post tries to carry both. If a section loses either of you, it failed.

A new essay most weeks. Subscribe and argue with me.

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