Farhan Thawar, head of engineering at Shopify, gave an excellent talk at the recent Cursor Compile event. A few things in particular stuck with me. The first takeaway was “the learning is the collateral, not the code.” He told a story about 50 engineers who spent 18 months building something and were ready to launch. The day before launch, Tobi — Shopify’s founder — asks one question: “If you could start over, how would you build it?” ...
Prompting is the new COBOL. Still technically works. Still widely practiced. Ancient. Boris Cherny — the guy who built Claude Code — said it straight: “I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops that are running. They’re the ones prompting Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.” Peter Steinberger said the same thing. 2.2 million people saw it. The point isn’t subtle: the work has moved up a level. You don’t write the code anymore. You write the system that writes the code. ...