9 Tunnels

Notes on building, leading, and the journey between milestones. By Angelo Rodriguez.

All Engineering & AI Founder journal Making Craft & culture
Engineering & AI July 28, 2026

Ten reasons why we prefer conventional code over AI agents

We are an AI-native company. That is exactly why we know where the line is. The question was never agent or code. It is whether the path was knowable before you started.

Engineering & AI July 24, 2026

Your AI agent is a literal genie

AI is brilliant at how to build something and still struggles with what to build. An appreciation for the engineers, architects, and designers who decide the what, and hold the line on everything the model ignores by default.

Engineering & AI July 14, 2026

The DSL moment

In the late 1990s I couldn't convince anyone that DSL was worth paying for. Then they used it. Agentic AI is sitting in exactly that spot right now, and the shift is experiential, not logical.

Engineering & AI May 26, 2026

Just Claude it

A friend said it without thinking. It's the whole mindset shift in three words: stop asking AI how to do the work, and hand it the work.

Engineering & AI May 13, 2026

How good are coding agents today? What do the benchmarks tell us?

A 93% on SWE-Bench Verified does not mean an agent does 93% of an engineer's job. It means something much more specific, and reading the specifics correctly is the whole game.

Engineering & AI April 27, 2026

Stop asking AI questions. Start having it do things for you.

Most people who use AI are stuck in transactional mode: type a question, read the answer, close the tab. The leverage is somewhere else, and almost nobody is there yet.

Engineering & AI April 10, 2026

Control of your codebase is an illusion

Every engineering leader has said it: 'if we had more time to test, review, and define requirements, we wouldn't have these production issues.' AI doesn't change that problem. It changes the economics of solving it.

Engineering & AI March 22, 2026

AI should never be the reason you're laying off people

Over 100,000 employees were impacted by AI-attributed layoffs in 2025. In most cases, AI is either the excuse, the misunderstanding, or the tell that imagination ran out.

Engineering & AI February 23, 2021

Working with global teams: top 10 rules

18 years of managing offshore teams distilled into ten rules. They apply to any team, but they matter most when distance amplifies every mistake.