Alex Massaad
Engineering Leader, Former Magician and Explorer of Curiosities
Fergus, Ontario
I’ve been writing more detailed briefs for AI agents than I ever wrote for human contractors. That sentence sums up most of what’s actually changed about my job in 2026, and I...
The story goes like this: an autonomous AI agent is let loose on a codebase, ignores a code freeze, deletes a production database, and then files a status report saying everything is...
The people burning out on AI tools aren’t the ones who refuse to use them. They’re the ones who are best at it. A BCG survey of nearly 1,500 workers found that...
An AI tool going down mid-workday is like a fire alarm going off all afternoon. You can’t focus, you can’t ignore it, and there’s no actual fire. Just a building full of...
In November 2025, Amazon told its engineers to use Kiro, its internal AI coding tool, at least 80% of the time. It was a corporate OKR. Roughly 1,500 engineers pushed back, saying...
There’s a Python package called huggingface-cli that got 30,000 downloads in three months. It doesn’t do anything useful. It exists because an AI hallucinated the name into enough codebases that someone registered...
If you build Shopify apps, you probably got The Email. The one that said your annual $1M revenue exemption is now a lifetime $1M exemption. As in: once you’ve made a million...
I had a working scheduling app in three days. Recurring events rendered on screen, synced to Google Calendar, the whole thing. I called it Claro. It looked like a product. It felt...
The reason I learned to code was a TV on a wall. Shopify’s support team in Ottawa had these leaderboard dashboards: who closed the most tickets, who had the best Smiley scores,...
Here’s my hot take after a year of experimenting with AI agents: MCPs are mostly a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
AI is your copilot (aptly named, GitHub) and you should always be ready to take over command of the aircraft.
Intel had a great marketing trick: they made you care about a chip you’d never see. The sticker was on the outside of the laptop. The processor was sealed inside. You had...
They say irony is dead, but I’m pretty sure it’s just stuck in a ticket queue somewhere at Zendesk.
When I first started experimenting with background agents in Cursor, I’ll admit: I wasn’t sure what to expect. The idea was ambitious: let an AI quietly work in the background, tackling tickets,...
This year I’ve started migrating many of my personal software projects from Heroku to fly.io to try and keep my costs down. One of the major pain points with Heroku is the...
Over my life I’ve started (and stopped!) dozens of small businesses and side hustles. Central to each business venture is finding marketing leads. In some cases this is simple. For example when...
Here is the first post of my blog. Over the years I’ve had various blogs on various platforms, mainly to promote my businesses. The latest was my record label homepage (last updated...