Hi, I'm Chris. Software engineer for the past 10 years. Increasingly over the past year our so, I've been strongly encouraged to use AI to help me move faster. I resisted this at first and was very skeptical of the benefits. It was clear that agents could create working software, but the large number of mistakes made the gains feel marginal. As the models have improved, I've gotten more comfortable shipping code mostly, or even totally written by AI. But for me, by far the most value has come through technical discussions (letting the model research our codebase and talking through ways to improve it, for example), and learning sessions (honing my chops in the shell; or going deep on an unfamiliar engineering topic like Change Data Capture). I'm hoping to start leveraging AI more to help our team make sound foundational decisions and build robust and _simple_ systems. Jake seems to be years ahead of everyone else on this stuff, and I'm eager to learn more about his unique approach to the topic.