Am I holding this right?

Oh great, another session about AI. Your social media feeds are already flooded with agentic this and spec-driven that; one-shot rewrites and everyone-is-a-programmer-now.

I am not using genAI to go faster but to go broader. It lets me offload (significant) side concerns in areas where I am competent but have no wish to become proficient; the time-sink supporting work that I would either hack together badly myself or side-step altogether.

I want to share some models and metaphors that are helping me make sense of this new world: why Ward Cunningham hates printers; how riding a fixie isn’t really cycling; why I'm treating Claude as a fantastic researcher and a terrible programmer; how test-first is the new TDD.

I am calling this adjacent engineering. Sometimes these side quests become significant enough to spin off into their own entire product, which I call adjacent discovery.

My goal is to give you a more nuanced take on generative AI, to help you cut through all the noise and get actual work done.