Writing · Five essays
Notes on software’s disappearing middle.
History, control, abstraction, and what no-code teaches us about the claims now being made for AI coding.
The Ladder That Climbed Itself: Software’s Progressive Removal of the Human
Software history is often told as a sequence of languages. A more useful view is a sequence of decisions humans no longer have to express.
No-Code’s Ceiling and the Sideways Delivery of Its Promise
No-code did not eliminate software development. It relocated much of the promised benefit into platforms, components, and AI-assisted workflows.
Bottleneck Migration: What a Decade of No-Code Reveals About AI Coding Claims
When software gets easier to generate, the constraint does not vanish. It moves—from implementation toward definition, verification, and control.
When Abstractions Are Extracted, Not Received: LLMs and the Break in the Software Ladder
Traditional abstractions are intentionally designed and handed down. Language models infer usable patterns from examples, changing how software layers are formed.
From Machine Code to Prose: How Coverage Stopped Scaling with Headcount
As software moved from machine instructions toward natural language, the amount one person could express grew faster than the teams available to implement it.