https://chrisloy.dev Chris Loy's blog on software engineering, AI, and leadership en-GB Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:22:22 GMT https://chrisloy.dev/post/2026/02/14/when-interfaces-become-disposable https://chrisloy.dev/post/2026/02/14/when-interfaces-become-disposable Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT I recently became a parent for the first time, as my wife and I welcomed a beautiful baby boy into our lives in January of this year. As I write this, we are still in the first weeks of adjusting to the maelstrom of caring for a fragile, precious life that demands round-the-clock attention. In other words, we are not getting very much sleep. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/12/30/the-rise-of-industrial-software https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/12/30/the-rise-of-industrial-software Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT > _Industrial_ > > _adj. (sense 3a)_ > > Of or relating to productive work, trade, or manufacture, esp. mechanical industry or large-scale manufacturing; ( > also) resulting from such industry. > > —Oxford English Dictionary https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/11/14/system-design-assistants https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/11/14/system-design-assistants Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT As AI assistants become more dominant in the software industry, one best practice that I have recommended(/post/2025/09/28/the-ai-coding-trap) is to invest time and tooling in using AI across the whole SDLC (software development lifecycle). https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/09/28/the-ai-coding-trap https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/09/28/the-ai-coding-trap Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT If you ever watch someone “coding”, you might see them spending far more time staring into space than typing on their keyboard. No, they (probably) aren’t slacking off. Software development is fundamentally a practice of problem-solving, and so, as with solving a tricky crossword, most of the work is done in your head. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/09/08/unthinking-biases-and-fallacies https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/09/08/unthinking-biases-and-fallacies Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT I recently built a small flashcard web app(https://unthink.chrisloy.dev/) to help me learn and avoid various cognitive biases and logical fallacies. I find it helpful to document and recognise these behaviours, so I can avoid blindly repeating them in future. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/09/07/vibe-coding-art https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/09/07/vibe-coding-art Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT The advent of AI-assisted coding has made it almost trivially easy to spin up custom software. This has made it much easier to view coding a website as something as lightweight as recording music or engaging in some other hobby. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/08/03/context-engineering https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/08/03/context-engineering Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT As our use of LLMs has changed from conversational chatbots and into integral decision-making components of complex systems, our inference approach must also evolve. The practice of "prompt engineering", in which precise wording is submitted to the LLM to elicit desired responses, has serious limitations. And so this is giving way to a more general practice of considering every token fed into the LLM in a way that is more dynamic, targeted, and deliberate. This expanded, more structured practice https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/06/30/distance-metrics https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/06/30/distance-metrics Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT Ever been asked to deploy a machine learning model that outputs a "vector" or an "embedding"? Perhaps you've been asked to set up vector search over some text embeddings, and as soon as you look into it you find there's a bewildering array of options and parameters you have to pick from. This article is a short explainer to help the uninitiated find their way around one of those - picking the right distance metric. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/03/23/will-ai-replace-software https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/03/23/will-ai-replace-software Sun, 23 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT No, this is not another hot take about how AI is going to replace software engineers. Instead, I would like to explore the idea that, over time, AI might replace software itself. Which might lead you to ask - what exactly is the distinction? https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/01/24/modular-software-design https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/01/24/modular-software-design Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Whenever people ask me about my philosophy for building software, top of my list is always to say that I am a proponent of modular design. To explain what I mean by that, it is first necessary to understand a few of the fundamental theories that underpin how I view software engineering as a discipline, and then we can explore how those come together in a philosophy of modularity. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/12/24/llms-are-scrappy-innovators https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/12/24/llms-are-scrappy-innovators Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT The last few years have seen an explosion of innovation within the technology sector, driven by the advent of widely-accessible, commodity-priced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT family or Anthropic’s Claude models. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/12/12/comfort-with-ambiguity https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/12/12/comfort-with-ambiguity Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT Many job postings include a required skill for candidates to display “comfort with ambiguity”, a definition that itself can seem ambiguous alongside harder skills such as experience managing people, knowledge of particular technologies and so on. So what is this strange personal trait, and how can we develop it? https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/12/08/constraints-and-innovation https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/12/08/constraints-and-innovation Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT Any technological endeavour will operate under a series of constraints. These constraints come in many forms, and understanding the existing, nature and extent of those constraints is one of the primary roles of technology leadership within an organisation. As we shall see, a deep understanding of your own constraints can also be a catalyst for the fundamental innovation that separates great organisations from merely good ones. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/11/08/chief-how-officer https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/11/08/chief-how-officer Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT The most successful organisations have leaders with clear divisions in their responsibilities. In my role as a CTO or Engineering leader, I often find myself addressing the same type of problems, even in organisations with very diverse industries, teams and funding. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/11/03/how-to-reduce-mass https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/11/03/how-to-reduce-mass Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT In Newtonian mechanics, the degree of acceleration is proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass: https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/10/27/momentum-and-agility https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/10/27/momentum-and-agility Sun, 27 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT This article is the second in a series applying this framework to thinking about how software engineering teams operate and deliver. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/09/07/model-collapse https://chrisloy.dev/post/2024/09/07/model-collapse Sat, 07 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT A recent paper, published in Nature(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y), explores a critical issue facing generative AI models, termed "model collapse," which occurs when models are trained on data generated by earlier models, rather than genuine human-generated content. This process leads to a gradual and irreversible degradation in model performance, in which the models lose their ability to accurately represent the true underlying data distribution. This phenomenon is of parti https://chrisloy.dev/post/2023/11/10/software-engineering-mechanics https://chrisloy.dev/post/2023/11/10/software-engineering-mechanics Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT This article defines a few terms, borrowed wholly from Newtonian mechanics, to define a framework for thinking about how software engineering teams operate. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2023/03/19/ai-and-creativity https://chrisloy.dev/post/2023/03/19/ai-and-creativity Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long been thought of as a tool for automation and optimization, with a focus on improving efficiency and productivity. However, recent advancements in AI technology have sparked a new debate on its potential to enhance human creativity. In this article, we will explore the role of AI in creativity, its benefits, and its limitations. https://chrisloy.dev/post/2020/08/17/how-i-review-pull-requests https://chrisloy.dev/post/2020/08/17/how-i-review-pull-requests Mon, 17 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT Effective code reviews are an essential part of any successful collaborative software engineering endeavour. In recent years, the tool that I have most used for this purpose is also the primary tool that I use for source control in general - GitHub(https://github.com). To that end, I thought it might be useful to document the process by which I review code on GitHub, using the pull request tool. The below is by no means a comprehensive how-to guide, but rather a process that I have gradually evo