Craftsmanship
When everyone ships a website
Vibe coding lets anyone build a website, but it cannot make that website unique and safe
Ideas
Short essays, notes and opinions on software engineering, published directly on elienehme.fr
Leadership
A vision that is never executed is just a dream
A vision is only worth what teams can follow: execution that is faithful and practicable, a pragmatic trajectory rather than fine ideas nobody can keep up with
AI & Software Engineering
Why reinvent what already exists, or what will be native tomorrow
Rebuilding generic skills that plugins and integrations already provide, and that the next models will absorb, is rarely the right investment
AI & Software Engineering
If AI replaces developers, who will decide what it builds?
"AI will replace everyone", or, in the targeted version, "developers". Replacing a profession because its tool can now be generated confuses the two
AI & Software Engineering
Code is a means, not an end
A developer who only writes code will have less work, or none at all. The question is not whether AI writes the code, but what the developer brings beyond it
AI & Software Engineering
Sustainable competitive advantage, when AI writes the code
As AI writes more and more of the code, companies need to rethink where their sustainable competitive advantage will come from
Architecture
Advanced patterns never make up for a fragile foundation
Hexagonal architecture, clean architecture, CQRS: powerful patterns, often shown off without the good development practice that holds them up
AI & Software Engineering
What AI changes, and what it doesn’t, in software engineering
A short list of what AI has changed in the work, a shorter one of what it has not, and what that means for the engineer’s job
DevOps
Moving to the cloud is not moving the servers
Putting everything on infrastructure as a service, or containerising everything as is with huge images, is not a migration: it is a move that costs more
Leadership
A user story is not a technical task list
Code, test, describe the implementation: repeated in every user story, these tasks bring no business value, and Jira is not a development tool
Architecture
Why architecture reviews often fail
Reviews happen at the wrong time, with the wrong question. What has made them useful in my experience
Architecture
The hidden cost of technical decisions
The price of a technical decision is what it does to every decision that follows. Three questions to ask before making one
Architecture
What makes a codebase evolvable?
Evolvability is measured by doing, not read off a diagram. Five unglamorous traits of codebases that age well