Welcome back to I'm a Software Engineer ~ What Next? The podcast for devs figuring out their next move. Hosted by James Wilson and Matt Sinclair, we talk honestly about what it takes to build a meaningful career in tech.
This week we're joined by Peter Marreck, who's currently consulting on AI for legal workflows. Peter's route in was not the standard one: four years in the US Air Force as an electrical specialist on a KC-10 refueller (actively trying to avoid anything to do with computers — it didn't take), then Cornell, then web software since 2000 at FactSet, Deloitte, ThredUp and Desk, a decade running his own contracting shop, and a stint as Director of Engineering at Adgenes. A Commodore PET got him at age eight, and he's been smitten ever since.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why he wanted to be a doctor until he touched a Commodore PET, and why being into computers in the 80s was "social suicide"
- Trusting your gut, including the time someone told him not to buy Apple stock
- The centaur coder: five months of collaborating with an LLM, and what changed in how he thinks about design
- The thin coordinator pattern — a pure Zig functional core wrapped in a CFFI so any front end can hang off it
- Why LLMs are unusually good at Zig (close to C, and simple enough to "grok")
- Pushback on Dario Amodei: the people who survive are the ones who grab the surfboard, not the ones who get washed out
- Dunning-Kruger as a service, and what to make of Garry Tan's G-Stack prompts
- "Don't fire your engineers. Attack the backlog instead." — why this is the moment for the work that's been sitting in your backlog for two years
- Cognitive surrender as a third category of thinking, and the cost of handing too much off to the model
- "Idiocracy is a documentary from the future." — Peter on why the incompetence failure mode is scarier than the malicious one
🔗 Links
🗒️ Show Notes
- The Time Cost of How Is Zero
- I'm Building a Startup With (Nearly) No Team. Here's What That Actually Looks Like
- What works well and what doesn't
- Taste as Art
- Cognitive Surrender Is a New and Useful Term for How AI Melts Brains
- Cognitive surrender leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds
- Idiocracy (2006)
🗣️ Guest
- Peter Marreck — https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermarreck/
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