May 17th, 2026

Articles of the week

This week I picked up these articles:

• The Slop Cannons in your engineering org - Jake Handy
• The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML - Thariq (From Claude Code team)
• Until you get punched in the face - Cate Hall
• Forward Deployed Engineer - The Pulse (Gergely Orosz)

Learned/Notes

The 'Slop Cannons' in your engineering org

Without naming anyone, I want to say that I know some slop cannons, at work and outside of work. I agree with the article, I don't think these people are bad developers, all the ones I know — like the article says — are good developers. But they seem to want to produce a lot and end up creating slop because that's what AI produces when you don't clean up what AI generates.

I don't want to work in a place where this is a norm, I don't think AI slop is any good, unless you're doing a PoC or prototyping something. When it comes to production code though, it should be maintainable. Not only by you but others that may get to read it one day — be it AI agents or another human.

The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

I recommend anyone who is into AI a lot to read it, especially those who are getting tired of reading too much Markdown. Markdown is great for many things. However, when you want to showcase colors, different SVGs or images, different button styles, your best bet would be to use an HTML file instead.

Thariq included a ton of examples of things that he used HTML output files (instead of MD) for. My favorite thing he shared, which I think is great and I never thought about: Generate an HTML file that explains a concept or displays something you want to share with your team, and instead of sharing the file directly — like you'd have to do with MD as well — you can just submit your file to S3 and share the link to it, which will open the actual HTML with any styles you may have added into it. AI agents are great at this now. PS, Claude has this amazing designer skill.

Until you get punched in the face

I just want to say this: Cate Hall is an amazing writer. She is publishing her first book called "You can just do things", I'll be reading it! If anyone would like to make a book club to read it together, hit me up!

The lesson of this blog (not saying much because it's so short and would like you to go read it yourself): Don't assume you're learning the correct lessons, aka don't be delusional. Be aware, formulate different scenarios of why something happened so you have a few perspectives to look from instead of assuming the best one. This is so that you don't get broken when things go the wrong way.

Forward Deployed Engineer

Gergely posted about this role about 6 months ago, I don't think I looked much into it, but I did today and the role looks EXTREMELY interesting. I'm considering learning more about it and seeing if I should look into landing one.

Forward Deployed Engineers are basically developers who are mostly Solutions Architects, have a startup mindset, get things done end-to-end, take ownership, and don't fall in love with working on a given product because they work on different products all the time.

This role seems like it's continuing to grow (one of those semi-born with AI)!