Two designers who became engineers, comparing notes on what engineering even is now.
In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Nick Haroldsen, founder of Nth Powered and a twenty year veteran of UI design and development. They met arguing about AI on LinkedIn.
Both started in design. Both moved to code because they hated being removed from the building of the thing. Both now spend their days getting agents to produce output their teams can actually trust.
We get into:
- Why the bottleneck was never intelligence and is now trust
- Killing line by line code review, and what replaces it
- Gherkin tests, plain English, and reviewing the plan instead of the diff
- Why spec driven development spirals when one decision pivots
- Skills that are proprietary to your codebase and will never be in a model
- Catching a code smell by looking at a button, not the source
- Why more sub agents kept producing the same result slower
- The sorcerer apprentice setup, and where orchestration stops paying
- Cheap model plus expensive reviewer, and how the savings disappear
- A memory layer for the factory, so knowledge stops walking out with the engineer
Connect with Nick:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/graphnick/
Nth Powered: https://www.nthpowered.com
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