The Stages of Judgment-Driven Development Most of the pain I’ve seen in software wasn’t caused by bad code. It was caused by bad decisions that were never treated explicitly as such. In the last two posts, I argued that execution is no longer the bottleneck. AI made building cheap. Judgment is now the scarce resource. If that’s true, the way we develop software must change, not in terminology or ceremonies, but in where and how we place judgment. ...
What “Human Judgment” Actually Means in the Age of AI We often talk about judgment as if it were intuition, taste, or seniority, something vague that people either have or don’t. That framing is wrong. Judgment is not intuition. It’s accountability. In real systems, judgment isn’t about gut feeling or instinct. It’s about being accountable for decisions made under uncertainty. Judgment shows up in moments like deciding something is good enough to ship, deciding not to ship even though it technically works, deciding to stop a direction after weeks of investment, or deciding that a shortcut today will become an unacceptable liability six months from now. ...
When Vibe Coding Meets Reality I didn’t start thinking about this because I’m excited about AI writing code. I started thinking about it because I kept seeing the same patterns repeat over the years. This time, they come under a new name: vibe coding, the habit of describing what you want in natural language and letting an AI scaffold the system for you, often without deeply understanding the code it produces. ...