genis

Latest posts from Genís

• The vibe writing mess

  Nov 20 ⎯ Writing is much like painting. When you paint, you start by covering the blank canvas with thick strokes, and progressively use smaller brushes to start revealing the details. When writing, you're doing very much the same, just in your head. It starts with an idea, which at first feels crystal clear. But once you sit down to write about it, you realize it's just a mess of entangled and disorganized concepts in your head. Then you start writing to connect the pieces together and start revealing detail. This is actually happening in my head right now—while I'm writing this piece. I have a close friend who never liked writing, yet somehow, one day he told us about the book he was about to get published. I couldn't quite understand how he managed to achieve such feat, but I still admired him for it—publishing a book being one of the things I'd like to do before I die. Everything quickly clicked when he introduced us to the concept of ghostwriting. Ghostwriting is the practice of writing for someone else who will then take credit for the piece as its author. If you do a quick search for books that have been ghostwritten, you'll quickly understand how a lot of celebrities— that you'd never thought could be amazing writers—are actually selling best sellers with their name on the cover. I don't want to dive into the ethical side of it, but if you think about it, there's a lot of people with deeply interesting things to say, that we probably wouldn't read if they wrote it themselves. Also, I have nothing but respect for all those ghostwriters in the shadows. Ghostwriting used to be a luxury for the few, but in 2025—with the rise of AI tools—it's been democratized for the masses. Or so people think. There's a lot of people who are now throwing a vague idea—painting the canvas with only the thick strokes—and letting the AI define the details. As much as people believe they do, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini don't think, they're actually like the autocomplete on your phone, but on steroids. They are systems trained on humongous amounts of text that are capable of finding statistical relationships between words, structures or concepts. So no, AI is not ghostwriting for anyone, because at least with ghostwriters we had a soul behind the words. When everyone starts vibe writing, all the content on the internet that we consume doesn't sound, well, human. There's some light nuances between how a human and an LLM actually write, but we humans are surprisingly good at spotting it. An LLM doesn't actually reason to connect the dots, it connects them statistically, while in a human-written piece we can feel the struggle of reasoning through them. It feels like the internet is slowly becoming a place where robots interact with each other and we humans have become distant spectators. We have more content than ever, but it's as hollow as it gets. But I'm not trying to lecture anyone here. It's confession time. Yes. I'm guilty of using such tools to write for me. Not anymore, though—believe it or not every em dash in this piece has been carefully curated by me. No, I never did go as far as giving the AI a vague idea and let it unravel the rest for me—but I did provide an idea, bullet points, and some guidance on how to develop it. This was fun at the beginning, it made me feel productive, and every time I asked GPT to write something I'd get a dopamine rush—much like the one you'd get from a slot machine—in seeing the AI connect my dots in seconds. But much like a gambling addict, I soon started to realize the drawbacks of this. The first thing I noticed is that it was harder to recall some of my so-called written words. Skipping the mental exercise of connecting all the dots myself made me look like I knew what I was talking about, but the harsh reality is that I didn't. Trying to explain it to someone else was as hard as writing the piece from scratch. Not only that, but when I read my words again I realized those words sounded nothing like me. It was essentially losing my voice. I've been discussing writing like you would in blog posts, or journaling. But the reality is that I used these tools to write many more things. I started by writing that formal email I wasn't sure how to polish, I followed with blog posts, LinkedIn posts, Slack messages… and one day, I ended up passing the GPT Filter™ before sending a Whatsapp message to a friend. True story, by the way. When you adopt a tool in this manner, you've developed complete dependence, you've become an addict. It might not look like a big deal at first, but losing the ability to craft a simple message for a friend—having mental fogginess in such an arbitrary thing—looks quite like a big deal to me. We're talking about completely losing the ability to think, and to think critically. When we manually unfold the details on what we write there's an internal conversation—going back and forth in our head—that makes us question our own thoughts, which is actually what helps finding that mental clarity, something that doesn't happen when we delegate those skills to a program. Like I said, I've recently started writing again. And at first the pain was very real. It was hard to connect the dots. Any time I couldn't find the words, I had the urge to ask the AI assistant, and I realized how I became completely reliant on them. But I still forced myself to go on, and I'm glad I did. Not just because I noticed how I was slowly recovering my ability to put thoughts into words, but also because I got the joy of writing back. There's something oddly satisfying in the state of flow you put yourself into while writing. It's almost meditation. I feel I can't close this topic without mentioning a few ways to sensibly use these tools—at least, from my point of view. Instead of letting them do all the work for you I think sensible usages include things like grammatical or orthographic reviews, analyzing if the piece flows well together or even research on the topic you're writing about. Like any tool out there, tools are meant to accelerate us, not replace us. If you are a heavy user of vibe writing I hope this read gave you something to think about. As for myself, this piece might have its flaws—heck, it might even be garbage—but I enjoyed the hell out of writing it. I'm back to enjoying this craft, and I even picked up my fountain pen to journal on paper again. Fun times. Photo by Digital Content Writers India on Unsplash

  

• Get your manager promoted

  Nov 16 ⎯ The fastest way to advance in your career as a software engineer? Get your manager promoted. Cynical? Not really. Your success and your manager's are fundamentally intertwined. If they look good, so do you. Before we dive in: I wrote this myself. No AI—all em dashes in this post have been willingly used by me. Apparently this needs clarification nowadays. Dystopian, if you ask me. Anyway. Why being a React or Python expert won't cut it I strongly believe that the most impactful skills you can have as a software engineer have nothing to do with being an expert in any specific piece of technology. This is even more noticeable nowadays—where AI is democratizing technical knowledge—effectively shrinking the bridge between technical and non-technical folks. This doesn't mean you shouldn't invest time in improving your technical expertise, but that will only get you so far. I like to think about technical expertise like tools in your toolbox, but tools won't do you much good unless you know how, when, or for what to use them. Hard skills are great to get shit done. And that's extremely valuable, but why settle there? How to actually get your manager promoted Your job—whether it's explicit or not—is to make your manager successful. This is not about buttering up anyone. It's about going beyond what's assigned to you. You'll deliver your tickets and initiatives—that's the baseline—but promotions happen when someone consistently operates above expectations. What this means in practice: figure out what needs to be done that isn't being done, figure out how to do it, and most importantly—actually get it done. Spot the gaps nobody asked you to fill and fill them anyway. The easiest way to do this is probably tackling tech debt. That functionality your neighbor team keeps breaking after every release? Test added. That complex query older than the most veteran employee in the company? Refactored. Your manager now gets credit for a more stable system. Another way is to empathize with the user and find small UX improvements that can deliver a lot of impact. Put yourself in the user's shoes and understand where they struggle. Something as simple as adding a search box next to a long list of items can go a long way. Your manager could then point to improved user satisfaction metrics. A very powerful one is to find shortcuts. There's nothing that will make you—and specially your manager—look better than delivering ahead of time. If you have a strategy to deliver the same feature, with the same amount of impact, in a shorter span of time, you just found gold. We once found a way to deliver a one-and-a-half month initiative in barely a week, by finding a way to reuse parts of the code that initially were thought to be built from scratch. Do that, and your manager will look like a genius for hitting deadlines early. Ask for forgiveness, not permission You may already be willing to put these into practice, but you might also feel there's no time for them. Usually teams have a pretty packed roadmap with higher priorities. If that's the case I'd—first and foremost—challenge the roadmap. If you're able to properly sell why you think all these improvements are a necessity, most capable managers will figure out a way to slip them into the roadmap. Sadly, this will not always work out. In that case, just don't ask for permission. And I mean it. If you have some downtime—maybe you closed a ticket early, or are waiting reviews from your peers—work on these instead of letting your manager know you don't have stuff on your plate. Tread lightly though, you need to be sure you’re doing impactful work without delaying whatever the team has committed to deliver. In the same way nothing makes your manager look better than delivering ahead of time, nothing will make them look worse than false promises. Also, don't try this on your first week. What's in it for me? When your manager succeeds, you typically benefit directly. You might become the natural successor for their role or you get pulled into bigger projects and higher visibility work. Make someone successful and they will remember. They will advocate for you. They will create opportunities for you. They will find a way to promote you if it's in their hands. Ever seen engineers that aren't the best coders advancing fast? They're the ones who understand that success is a team sport—and that helping your manager win is how you position yourself to win too. Cover photo by N Kamalov on Unsplash