DEV Community: Cesar Aguirre

If AI can do it in minutes, it's not special.

Cesar Aguirre — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:42:25 +0000

Cesar Aguirre

Jul 6

The Mantra to Thrive in the AI Hype

#coding #beginners #softwaredevelopment #ai

1 min read

The Mantra to Thrive in the AI Hype

Cesar Aguirre — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 05:00:00 +0000

If AI can do it in minutes, it's not special.

AI has made coding accessible.
You don't need a degree or bootcamp to have something working.
A few prompts to an LLM can replace hours or days of work.

That's good news...and bad news.

A portfolio with the same to-do apps no longer stands out.
Anyone can do that with AI in a few minutes.
Maybe the alternative is a "build/learn in public" YouTube channel.
Or contributing to non-trivial open source projects.

A take-home challenge doesn't work for hiring.
Again. An easy task for AI.
Maybe whiteboarding interviews won't go away.
Or we're back to onsite interviews.

Only crafting clean code isn't enough

Forget about syntax, lines of code, and only crafting clean code.

Don't burn your copy of Clean Code.
You still need to tell whether what AI spits out is good code.

You need to do what AI can't:

Ownership when code breaks
Collaboration to build trust
Communication to present technical problems clearly

That's what you can't automate.
That's what makes you special.
That's what AI can't do.

Those skills worked 10 years ago and will work 10 years from now.

To help you build the skills to stand out, I wrote Street-Smart Coding—The roadmap I wish I had on my journey from junior to senior.

What would you add to the list?

Cesar Aguirre — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 16:26:28 +0000

The shift from code to meetings

Cesar Aguirre

Jun 8

12 Hard Truths About Coding I Learned the Hard Way After 10+ Years

#career #careerdevelopment #beginners #coding

3 min read

A career growth hack I wish I knew earlier

Cesar Aguirre — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:28:29 +0000

Cesar Aguirre

Jun 29

Always Be Writing About What You Do at Work

#career #careerdevelopment #beginners #writing

1 min read

Always Be Writing About What You Do at Work

Cesar Aguirre — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 05:00:00 +0000

Writing about what you do at work is better than simply claiming on your CV that you did something.

What you could write about

Write about what you're doing and what you're learning at work:

Most common code review comments you give or receive.
Challenges you're facing while solving a problem.
Lessons you're learning from every project.
Checklist you use to review pull requests.
Difficult situations you have overcome.

Anything that takes you more than 20 minutes to figure out becomes a post. I call those posts: "Today I learned" posts.
That's the easiest way to start writing.

You don't have to show real code

There are always alternatives to avoid disclosing real code.

99% of the time, we're not doing top-secret rocket science.
But companies don't want the world to know how they're doing CRUD applications.

You can share isolated coding blocks and use different business domains to represent examples and coding issues.
Using movies, posts, and reservations is a good alternative.

Instead of saying "trust me, I know how to do that," you could say "I've done it and here's where I wrote about it."

Street-Smart Coding covers writing as a coder, along with 29 more lessons to help you level up your coding skills.

What would you add to the list?

Cesar Aguirre — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:27:19 +0000

The shift from code to meetings

Cesar Aguirre

Jun 8

12 Hard Truths About Coding I Learned the Hard Way After 10+ Years

#career #careerdevelopment #beginners #coding

3 min read

Coding isn't flying, but...

Cesar Aguirre — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:19:00 +0000

Cesar Aguirre

Jun 22

What Software Engineering Should Learn from Aviation (And from Rare Plane Crashes)

#coding #programming #softwaredevelopment #career

2 min read

What Software Engineering Should Learn from Aviation (And from Rare Plane Crashes)

Cesar Aguirre — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:00:00 +0000

Originally posted on my blog.

Flying is safe but... accidents happen.

When they happen, it's all over the news. But the thousands upon thousands of safe flights don't make it to the headlines.

The magic of the Internet took me to Admiral Cloudberg, "analyzer of plane crashes." Each post breaks down a rare accident, tracing the failed part or procedure that triggered the disaster.

After binge-reading some of Admiral Cloudberg's deconstructions, what struck me was the meticulous investigation after every accident.

After every accident, there's an investigation

A committee finds out exactly what happened and why.

I remember reading about a maintenance crew who cleaned a plane after some painting, with too much water, too much pressure, and too close to the fuselage or something. Water damaged some tiny part somewhere that caused a whole chain of events that led to a crash. Yes, that's the attention to detail committees have to deal with after accidents. Don't worry that won't happen again.

A committee's task is to find the root cause and the subsequent chain of events. After finding the root cause, they:

Release bulletins to manufacturers
Update procedures and checklists
Add the accident scenario to simulators to train pilots

Their goal isn't to blame the captain, the control tower crew, or anyone else, but to prevent the same mistakes in future flights.

Coding isn't flying

As software engineers, often we hear or say—at least I have:

"Something went wrong. We don't know why. It hasn't happened since then."

"OK, let's move on. We still have some tickets to close this sprint. If that happens again, we'll take a deeper look."

Imagine if we treated coding the same way:

Checklists to release code
Another checklist for incidents
Fully-researched outages and crashes
Clear onboarding processes
Automated best practices
Guilty-free culture

No more developers deleting a production database by mistake. Coding would be as safe and reliable as flying, for both end users and coders.

We must adopt the same commitment to safety protocols and procedures to never let the same mistake happen twice. Or maybe I'm asking for the moon.

Just like for pilots, debugging and clear communication are key skills for coders. Street-Smart Coding covers those two, along with 28 more lessons to help you level up your coding skills.

#1.—Use AI as a calculator.

Cesar Aguirre — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:03:42 +0000

Cesar Aguirre

Jun 15

Unpopular Opinions on AI-Assisted Coding That May Annoy You

#discuss #coding #beginners #ai

2 min read

#3.—Use AI for opposite tasks.

Cesar Aguirre — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:07:17 +0000

Cesar Aguirre

Jun 15

Unpopular Opinions on AI-Assisted Coding That May Annoy You

#discuss #coding #beginners #ai

2 min read

Unpopular Opinions on AI-Assisted Coding That May Annoy You

Cesar Aguirre — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 05:00:00 +0000

Vibecoding was bad. But now, AI-assisted coding seems...fine?

Nothing sparks more heated discussions than asking coders about best practices. The other day, someone I follow on LinkedIn shared his weekend AI experiment to build an app. As usual, "passionate" coders threw virtual stones, saying he didn't follow the right approach, engineering practices, or the latest spec workflow.

To turn the conversation around, he asked for our unpopular opinions about AI-assisted coding.

To avoid burying mine in a comment, here they are:

#1. Use AI as a calculator.

Only useful if you know what you're doing. Otherwise, it's just a cool toy.

#2. Don't let AI touch code directly.

That's my go-to rule for coding with AI.

Unproductive? Maybe. But it forces me to decompose problems and validates AI-generated code.

#3. Use AI for opposite tasks.

This is my most recent rule:

If I write code, AI reviews it. If AI generates it, I review it.

According to a recent Sonar survey, only 48% of respondents always check AI-assisted code before committing. #yolo, right? By reviewing, I'm already in the top 50%.

#4. AI is like a semi-autonomous car.

You trust it to steer, but you never take your hand off the wheel. Otherwise, AI could be a sloppy junior coder with bad memory.

AI alone won't make you a great coder. It only amplifies the skills you already have. That's why I wrote Street-Smart Coding—because you need more than syntax to stand out.

#2.—Showing progress is better than doing the work.

Cesar Aguirre — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:42:55 +0000

The shift from code to meetings

Cesar Aguirre

Jun 8

12 Hard Truths About Coding I Learned the Hard Way After 10+ Years

#career #careerdevelopment #beginners #coding

3 min read