Most prompting advice is written for general audiences. “Be specific.” “Give examples.” Useful, but shallow. As software developers, we have a different relationship with LLMs than someone drafting marketing copy. We think in types, interfaces, and constraints. We can leverage that.

A lot of languages come and go. Elixir has been around since 2011, runs on an Erlang VM that dates to 1986, and yet in 2026 it keeps quietly powering some of the most reliable systems on the web. If you’ve been putting off learning it, here’s why now is still a great time.

Most engineers think the jump to principal is about deeper technical expertise. It isn’t. The single biggest shift from senior to principal is the scope of influence — and that scope is almost entirely defined by your ability to work across teams you don’t control. You stop being the person who builds the best solutions for your team and start being the person who makes sure the entire engineering organization doesn’t build six incompatible versions of the same thing.

A new research paper from Anthropic has quantified something many developers have suspected: using AI coding assistants can make you worse at programming. But the findings are more nuanced than that headline suggests, and they contain practical guidance for anyone using AI tools to write code.

The job of a software engineer looked very different ten years ago. It looked different five years ago. And in the past eighteen months, with the rise of capable AI agents, the ground has shifted again. This time, though, the change isn’t just about new frameworks or cloud platforms. It’s about what we fundamentally spend our time doing.