Michael Aguilar

About the Job Hunt

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:34:00 +0000

Right now, the job market is really difficult. It’s tough for everyone working white-collar jobs, but it’s especially bad for new grads, or those with limited experience.

It’s a very frustrating experience.

Let’s clarify who is actually making the hiring decision and why you may not make it past each stage.

Generative AI Tutorial

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 11:54:00 +0000

Are you curious about how AI can enhance your work, but feel overwhelmed by the technical jargon? If so, you’re in the right place!

When you last interacted with AI, did it seem like a mysterious magic box, or did you feel empowered to mold it to your needs?

In this primer, we’re going to remove the magic, and help you understand it as a tool you can manipulate.

More About Prompts

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 11:54:00 +0000

Ever feel like you’re whispering into a megaphone when talking to AI? You’re not alone - and the fix is simpler than you think.

The system and user prompts

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 13:24:00 +0000

Ever wonder why AI sometimes acts like your chatty friend and other times like a stiff librarian? The difference often comes down to two invisible ingredients: the system prompt and your user prompt. Let’s peel back the curtain.

The Applicant Tracking System

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 13:34:00 +0000

An applicant will submit their resume, and it will be parsed - with varying results - into an Applicant Tracking System. Job descriptions, dates, and keywords will be added to various fields in a database.

Recruiters seldom read every resume that comes in. Some still do, but given how many applications they receive it’s become even less common.

The problem with the ATS: When a recruiter queries the ATS, they look for keywords, and get back a list of applications with a score. If an applicant’s keywords don’t line up, then they get a lower score. They won’t be rejected. They won’t even be considered.

Recruiters

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:34:00 +0000

The recruiter will take the job description and post it somewhere. They may do it themselves, and/or send it to one or more third-party agencies.

It’s important to note that recruiters are paid to place people into jobs. If they don’t find someone, they don’t get paid.

They have a lot of incentive to find someone the hiring manager will accept. Not necessarily the best candidate, but the one that will get them paid the most money for the least effort.

The problem with recruiters: They’re all different. They all have their own way of evaluating candidates. Ask three recruiters what’s the best way to get a job, and you’ll get five answers.

Hiring Managers

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 14:34:00 +0000

It all starts with the hiring manager. They have an opening, and they need to find some candidates.

The hiring manager will create a job description, and send it to a recruiter. In a larger organization, HR will play a big part in this.

They’re also very involved at the end. They have the final say as to whether or not a candidate is selected. Don’t blame the recruiter - they didn’t have anything to do with it.

The problem with hiring managers: For many, it’s something they do once or twice a year, if that often. They’re already overworked, and interviewing adds even more.

The Team Interview

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 13:34:00 +0000

One or more interviews will be with your future co-workers.

These interviews have a lot of impact on whether or not you’ll be hired. They aren’t always make-or-break, but the hiring manager will take their feedback very seriously.

The questions are usually technical in nature: “describe what a load balancer does”, “what does it mean when you get this error?”, and so on.

You may even get a curveball, like “tell me about a time you had to give bad news to your boss”.

Getting the job

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 13:34:00 +0000

Congratulations! You were offered the job! Now you can finally stop scouring job boards, filling out endless applications, hovering over your email, interviewing, and basically just stop worrying. What a relief!

An offer is a great step forward, but it isn’t the finish line. A lot can happen between “we’d like to hire you” and your first paycheck clearing the bank.

The problem with getting an offer: It’s only an offer. There may still be reasons you don’t have a new job.

Being rejected for a position

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 09:44:00 +0000

Applying for jobs is a numbers game. You send out resumes, cross your fingers, and hope something sticks. Sometimes it does. More often, it doesn’t.

You might get a polite rejection email. You might get ghosted completely. You might make it through three rounds of interviews only to vanish into the void.

That’s just how it is.

AI Generated Resumes

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 13:34:00 +0000

If you apply on LinkedIn, you may see that a given job has “100+” applicants in less than a day. That’s not a mistake, or a typo.

Just because you see so many applicants doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply if you’re qualified. You should.

Adding to the difficulty is that many of those 100+ applicants are faking it. It isn’t difficult to create a resume based on the job description. It’s easy to apply, so plenty of unqualified people just go for it. The potential of getting a job is a huge reward for very little effort.

The problem with AI Generated resumes: With the popularization of AI, creating and submitting a tailored resume is easier than ever. It will be perfectly formatted, have relevant bullet points, and follow the STAR method.

Ask Questions Until You Have a Complete Understanding of the Problem

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:16:00 +0000

You’ve probably seen the “car wash question” floating around AI forums by now. It’s become something of a Turing test for prompting skills, and a lot of LLMs fail it on the first try.

Here’s the setup: you ask an LLM, “I need to wash my car. The car wash is 100 yards away. Should I walk or drive?” A lot of times, the model confidently tells you to walk. After all, it’s only a football field’s distance - why burn gas?

AI Turns Senior Devs into Junior Devs

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:16:00 +0000

A lot of people assume AI coding assistants are an elevator to the top floor - that junior developers jump straight to senior productivity and seniors become superhuman. The reality is inverted. Right now, AI is resetting senior developers back to junior status, complete with the confusion, trial-and-error, and questionable output that comes with learning something entirely new.

The Documentation Desert

When you learned to code, there were textbooks. Style guides. Stack Overflow threads from 2009 explaining exactly why your regex was failing. With agentic coding, that foundation doesn’t exist yet.

Vibe coding still sucks

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 09:02:00 +0000

The confusion

I’ve been confused about comments and articles talking about vibe-coding. Many of the comments are along the lines of “it’s only good for small scripts,” or “it always generates garbage.”

That seemed at odds with my own experience with AI-assisted coding. I’ve been getting great results with aider-chat. It’s a command line app with no sub-agents, utilities, or anything like that. I’ve been responsible for much of the planning and guidance, and it’s been working well.

Custom Software for Everyone

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 08:16:00 +0000

It’s still a little early for this to be a reality, but it’s coming. The tools aren’t quite ready, and not enough people have the skills to make it happen. It won’t be long, though, before even the smallest businesses can justify hiring someone to write custom software for them.

Summary

AI-assisted development will soon make developers so efficient that custom, end-to-end software integration will become affordable for small businesses. Right now, small businesses rely on a patchwork of off-the-shelf tools, creating inefficiencies as employees manually move data between them. The high cost of developers makes true custom solutions impractical.

The Craftsman and the Code

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 06:16:00 +0000

To explain what’s happening with AI in software development, it helps to look at how a developer’s work is changing - how it was done, how it’s being done now, and where it’s heading.

Instead of computers, let’s talk about building furniture. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it works.

At some point in history, if you wanted furniture you needed to talk to a skilled craftsman. Anyone who has taken a shot at making simple furniture can attest that it takes more than hammering a few boards together. There are specialized tools and materials, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Interviewing Using AI Is Not Cheating

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 06:16:00 +0000

There’s a lot of complaining about candidates using AI during coding interviews. They say it’s “cheating”.

No, it’s not.

Using AI during an interview should be expected and encouraged. The goal of an interview isn’t to see if a candidate can pass a test. The goal is to figure out how well they would do the job.

This article talks about writing code, but the idea applies to just about any knowledge-focused job.

AI Development: Research, Plan, Implement

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 18:44:00 +0000

Let’s say you have a problem, and you’re pretty sure that writing an app is the solution. Maybe you want a basic inventory system for your small business. Or maybe you have a small piece of a large legacy system that needs upgrading. It doesn’t matter what it is.

You have a problem, you want software, and you want to make the most of agentic development.

The Problem with “Vibe-Planning”

The impulse is to just start chatting with an AI. You describe your problem, the AI suggests something, you correct it, it suggests something else, and you keep going back and forth until you have what seems like a solid plan.

This is “vibe-planning.” It feels productive, but it has a major flaw. The result is what you think is a good plan, which may or may not actually be a good plan. An AI will happily follow you down a bad path if you lead it there.

There’s a better way. The cool kids are calling it “Research, Plan, and Implement”.

The Disappearance of the Entry-Level Job

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:44:00 +0000

The headlines are terrifying. Every day seems to bring another story about how AI is going to wipe out entire categories of jobs. “The Disappearance of the Entry-Level Job” is a popular one.

These articles paint a grim picture of a world with no starting point for a career.

Like most things, the truth is somewhere in-between. While it’s true that many familiar junior-level positions are being changed or eliminated, that doesn’t mean there are no junior-level positions.

Say it with me: “the jobs will change”.

AI and the Hiring Landscape

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 07:09:00 +0000

There’s a lot of chatter about AI reshaping hiring, but it’s not as simple as “replace recruiters” or “solve everything.” The impact depends on how it’s trained, how it’s prompted, and how it’s used. It could streamline things or make them worse, depending on the setup.

AI Resume Editor - Alpha

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:29:00 +0000

Today we are releasing an early version of the Resume Editor, a web-based tool for creating and managing resumes.

This is an alpha release. This means we are still actively adding features and fixing bugs. The project is open source, and we are looking for feedback.

It Sucks Being a Manager

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 07:39:00 +0000

I’ve written quite a bit about the overall process of AI-assisted development. Not the “write code” part of it - if anything, that’s the easy part. There’s a process to writing a project which can be maintained, with bug fixes and new features.

What’s a little tough right now is constantly being in the position of being a manager, stakeholder, business, and end-user. I’ve understood it in an abstract, and tend to be careful about considering them.

It’s so very visceral now.

Which AI Model Should I Use For Coding?

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 06:09:00 +0000

Most of the big players (Anthropic, Google, et. al) provide all-in-one solutions for writing code. If that’s what you’re doing, that’s fine, but you may be missing out.

For one thing, they can be pretty expensive (unless your company is paying for it). Anthropic’s best - Opus - can get really expensive, really fast. Admittedly, it still costs less than paying for an overseas team, but if it’s coming out of your wallet you’re bound to notice.

Considering how quickly everything is moving, I’m sure this post will age like milk.

Advanced AI Code Automation

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 07:09:00 +0000

So, you’ve got a great process down for developing your code. You’ve got great documentation, 100% test coverage, good git branching and tagging, and all the other detailed steps for generating code.

It sure is a lot of typing, though, isn’t it? Very repititious. Obviously, you should automate those steps! You’re only a little bit away from typing in “Write me an app that does X,Y, and Z!” and then taking a nap while it does the work!

Not so fast…

"AI is a bubble!" Yea, So What?

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:09:00 +0000

“AI is just a bubble!” Yep, sure is. So what? That’s no reason to ignore it, or to brush it off as a fad. While nobody can be 100% sure exactly how it will make the world look in five years, you can be sure the world will look different.

Calling something a “bubble” is often a way to dismiss it. But history shows that even when a bubble pops, the underlying technology doesn’t just go away. It sticks around and changes everything.

How AI will change a developer's job

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 09:44:00 +0000

There’s been a lot of noise about AI replacing developers. Spoiler: it won’t. But your job is changing in ways nobody’s really talking about.

AI Doesn't Eliminate Jobs, It Changes Them

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 08:34:00 +0000

AI isn’t going to take your job, it’s going to change your job. There are things you do as part of your job now which will go away, but new parts will be added.

Reliably Building AI Systems

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 12:16:00 +0000

I recently built a production-ready application entirely with AI assistance, 100% written by the AI - not as a proof-of-concept, but as a functional tool designed to solve complex workflow problems.

It wasn’t magic, it was work.

Update: The application code is now over 5,600 lines of code, plus 16,000 lines of code in 883 tests giving 100% coverage including branches.

AI development: the good and bad

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 09:44:00 +0000

There is a lot of discussion about using AI for development. Much of it is over-stated hype, either for or against.

“AI only turns out garbage” is what some people will tell you.

“AI will replace developers” is what others will say.

Like most things, the truth is somewhere in-between.

Summary

AI-assisted development can help create code faster, but pitfalls like amplified design flaws and cascading errors demand careful handling

This article cuts through the hype by showing how unchecked AI use mirrors real-world failures like Knight Capital’s $500M loss (caused by human process gaps, not technology).

Even skilled developers like “Alice, Bob, and Charlie” introduce subtle mistakes when inheriting code under time pressure, and AI accelerates these risks by acting like a new developer every time you hit “enter” - forgetting context, skipping safeguards, and magnifying poor documentation or rushed decisions.

It is important that you need to enforce defensive practices (like file operation safeguards and explicit error checks) while juggling roles as architect, reviewer, and quality gatekeeper to prevent small oversights from exploding at machine speed.