Archive - Strategize Your Career

Stop using AI as a chat box

Use AI for investigation, review, and QA reports, while keeping architecture, product risk, and ownership with the human.

Jun 28 • Fran Soto

This is for engineers falling behind on AI

Most teams do not need frontier AI. They need one safe workflow other engineers can copy.

Jun 21 • Fran Soto

Loop Engineering: Designing Systems That Prompt

Get the free AI Agent Building Blocks ebook when you subscribe:

Jun 15 • Fran Soto

You’re Not Behind. This is Your Problem

A batter way to reset your software engineering career without starting over or chasing every new title.

Jun 8 • Fran Soto

May 2026

Read this before your org gets cut

Layoffs do not always mean you failed. They often reveal whether your work is visible, funded, and portable.

May 31 • Fran Soto

The Smallest Reliable Working Set

Bigger context windows won’t fix bad workflows. The real skill is deciding what an agent should load, forget, and persist.

May 24 • Fran Soto

The token leaderboard trap

AI made coding faster, but not always shipping. Here is how to measure productivity without confusing token burn with value

May 17 • Fran Soto

Why Open Source Maintainers Are Done With AI Slop

AI made PRs, issues, and security reports cheap. Maintainer trust, review time, and ownership stayed expensive.

May 10 • Fran Soto

I turned my calendar into an AI-powered time tracking system

I use an AI calendar agent to close blocks, tag work and life, and show the gap between my ideal week and reality

May 6 • Fran Soto

Why the top GitHub repos are markdown files

A few years ago, the top GitHub repo of the week was usually something you could run.

May 3 • Fran Soto

April 2026

Is AI making you a worse developer?

Anthropic: AI-assisted juniors score 17% lower. Carnegie Mellon: AI code is 41% more complex. Seven patterns I see on my own team every week.

Apr 26 • Fran Soto

The engineer AI can't replace

The engineering judgment AI can't produce. What developer taste is, what it looks like in real code, and how to develop it before AI makes the question…

Apr 19 • Fran Soto

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