Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Rainy Days Some places have more rain than others. Some cities or regions have rainy seasons; one way or another, rain will happen. Either because it is in the season or because the players are traveling to play, and there is rain where they are right now. 

I wrote my 5th book! The Art of Sense: A Philosophy of Modern AI - take a look here . This book is free; it's me giving back. I hope you like it. It's my second git book; the first git book was SAL . AI is one of my new passions; this book will help you in your journey. If you are not a data scientist, this could be a good starting point. If you are already a scientist, it could be a chance to learn something new from someone with an architecture/engineering background. You don't need to be a data scientist to do AI, especially in engineering nowadays. So even if you are a scientist or a researcher, this book might give you food for thought. This book is Free.

Many people think that today, Gen AI is the revolution of the machines. That AI will make an engineer 3-5x more productive. Well, that’s not true and not even close to being true. Let’s pretend it’s true for one moment, then we can apply some scale economics to Generative AI, especially with AI coding agents like Claude Code or OpenAI Codex.   Let me be honest: I don’t think that using AI you can get 3-5x the productivity from engineers right now. There are so many things I need to debunk here; it’s even hard to choose one to start with. But for a moment, just. For the sake of argument, let’s believe it's true(just for a moment). That will help you to understand why AI has suddenly become so appealing to companies.

I wrote my 4th book! Diego Pacheco's Software Architecture Library (SAL). This book is free; it's me giving back. I hope you like it. It's my first git book. Architecture is one of my passions; this book will help you in your journey. If you are not an architect, this could be a good starting point. If you are already an architect, it could be a chance to learn something new. You don't need to be an architect in order to do architecture. So even if you are an engineer or an engineering manager, this book might give you food for thought. This book is Free.

One common mistake engineers make is to test mocks. However, would you know what the right principles are and how to spot good or bad tests according to these principles?  IF you don't have first principles, you are very likely shooting into the dark.  In Brazil, we have this metaphor that if you play chess with a pigeon (I will use a chicken in this post), you will very likely lose because the pigeon does not know what it is doing and probably will be upset with you for whatever you say. People say if you truly know, you know how to explain. Well, I will go further and say IF you truly know you extract first principles and explain with those principles, so your explanation is short, concise, and direct. Otherwise, you are a chicken on a chessboard just doing random things you don't fully understand.

No. This is not a blog post about AI. However, this title could be easily confused with a famous AI paper about transformers, Attention is All You Need ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 ). Perhaps the machines know something we dont. In all seriousness, attention or focus is really a prerequisite for engineers. In order to understand complex tasks, make sense of complicated systems full of technical debt and anti-patterns, and reason on vague Jira tickets, engineers need focus. Without focus, basically, it's impossible to do engineering. Time drags you down, and what should be 1-2 days turns into weeks or even months. It's possible to get things done without really understanding what's going on. Software is about layers and layers of abstraction; nobody understands all the things in the universe. However, engineers think it's fine to move forward without solid foundations, and that's a huge mistake. IMHO, it's an attention issue. Imagine you are driving, you d...

AI Agents and vibing are growing in popularity. It's time for us to think about what use cases make sense to use them and what use cases it would be a mistake to use them. AI is changing how people work, learn, and behave. Should I vibe or not vibe? Vibing can be useful when AI Agents have limits. Vibe coding has several drawbacks, including security challenges, hallucinations, and incorrect facts. However, there are a couple of use cases where vibing can be useful, when: It's not a priority : Imagine there is code that you would never write, tools you would never create, simply because you have bigger priorities and would never spend weeks or months on such tasks. It's not your specialty : Let's say you would never learn C# to make a Windows extension of your application, but with AI Agents or even with vibing, you can get that done without much effort. Limited Resources : You either lack the time or the funds to undertake such a task. AI agents/vibing can allow you to...