…unspoken rule of the game we’re all playing: in our information economy, if you can’t learn quickly and effectively, you’re going to get left behind.

— Jonathan A. Levi, The Only Skill That Matters

The alternative approach might be called the Hail Mary strategy. Instead of getting a prototype out quickly and gradually refining it, you try to create the complete, finished product in one long touchdown pass. Countless startups destroyed themselves this way during the Internet Bubble. I’ve never heard of a case where it worked.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Most monoliths will eventually have to be rethought and redesigned, but trying to pinpoint when is like trying to predict the exact moment you will outgrow a favorite sweater.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

if you led the most unrepentant optimist through the hospitals, military wards, and surgical theatres, through the prisons, torture chambers and slave stalls, through battlefields and places of judgment, and then open for him all the dark dwellings of misery that hide from cold curiosity, then he too would surely come to see the nature of this best of all possible worlds.

— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

We’re not victims of AI taking over programming. We’re not heroes saving the profession from artificial intelligence. We’re just humans repeating historical patterns with slightly better tools and considerably less self-awareness.

— Krzyś, The Junior Developer Extinction: We’re All Building the Next Programming Dark Age