Matthew van Bird

Notes from Matthew van Bird - senior staff engineer writing on .NET, AWS, distributed systems, and pragmatic AI engineering.

Writing

Cutting the Wrong Layer - 2026-10-11
Can You Take a Look? - 2026-10-06
Is Abstraction an Art or a Science? - 2026-09-17
Drawing This Site With Archify - 2026-08-28
There Are No Lifetimes - 2026-08-13
Trust Me, I Prompted It - 2026-07-24
Good, Says Who? - 2026-07-10
The Death of Mapping Frameworks - 2026-07-01
The Tractor Is Already Dead - 2026-06-16
Automating the Rubber Stamp: What If an Agent Ran Your Deployment Gate? - 2026-06-11
Recovering from AI Psychosis - 2026-06-01
Snowplow + Snowflake: The Stack Is Fine, The People Are The Problem - 2026-05-24
Pick Your Poison: NuGet's Quiet Wrong Versions vs npm's Loud Supply Chain - 2026-03-22
Writing Skills for AI Coding Tools (And Why Most Shouldn't Exist) - 2026-02-18
How AI Made Us Productive and Clueless: A 2025 Retrospective - 2026-01-01
Why You Should Avoid Using Exceptions for Normal Application Flow in C# - 2025-05-10
The good, the bad and the ugly of Vibe Programming with Cursor - 2025-04-21
The Hidden Cost of “Free” Open Source - 2025-04-08
The Full-Stack Illusion - 2025-03-03
Infinite References and Their Elegance - 2025-02-22
Head vs Heart Engineering - 2025-02-08
The Corporate Conundrum: Why Employees Tolerate Inferior Tools, Processes and Systems - 2025-01-03