Josh Wills has shipped code you ran today: Google's ad auction, Slack, and now the data pipelines that train foundation models at Datology. He also barely touches a keyboard anymore.

His argument is that this is fine, because writing code was never the job. Understanding the problem was, and review is how a senior engineer proves it. We work through where taste comes from when nobody writes first drafts, why agent-written pipelines run correctly at forty times the cost, why mathematicians are now going through the grief programmers went through a year ago, and whether software will ever get its AlphaZero moment: an engine that teaches us something new about how to build a database, rather than a very fast slot machine trained on ourselves.

Also: chess bots that finally feel human, the beer emulator, and why typos are now proof of work.

Chapters
00:03:59 — Josh's daily practice, and the week it clicked
00:13:37 — Review was always the job
00:18:16 — Math's turn: proofs that work but aren't beautiful
00:24:48 — Agent-written pipelines: correct, and comically expensive
00:35:07 — Chess bots that feel human
01:01:20 — Is there a Stockfish for software?
01:13:08 — Prose as proof of work
01:16:33 — Paid to understand problems

After Coding is hosted by Keith Adams of Pebblebed.