Software Engineering on Sumner Evans

How I Want to Use AI

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 06:25:00 -0600

TL;DR

The chat-based workflow encouraged by existing AI harnesses results in a fragmented source of truth for the desired functionality of the software.

To centralise the source of truth, we should use Markdown as Source (MaS). We should adopt a Specify, Generate, Inspect, Loop (SGIL) workflow which puts human-written Markdown files stored in source control front-and-centre.

My Current AI Workflow

I hate my AI workflow. I don’t know how everyone else is using AI, but currently my workflow looks something like:

Open Claude and type a chat message indicating what I want it to do.
Look at the code or plans it generates and test the functionality of the code it produced.
Type a chat message clarifying my ask or correcting the AI’s assumptions. Normally this involves telling it what I dislike about the code it generated.
Go to 2.

Stop Using Conventional Commits

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 06:25:00 -0600

You’ve almost certainly encountered Conventional Commits before. It may have reared its ugly head in the changelog of an open source project you’ve used. It may have been the enforced commit format for an open source project you contributed to. A lot of people swear by it. I swear at it.

Even though it is used by a large number of popular open source projects, Conventional Commits is an actively bad standard which encourages focus on the wrong things and fails to deliver on its promises.

Three Resume Tips

Thu, 07 May 2026 06:25:00 -0600

I have been asked a few times to review student resumes and in my current position I review quite a few resumes of potential candidates.

I think a lot of resume advice out there is tied to formatting, presentation, and writing style. While all of that is important, I think that it’s been well-adjudicated.

In this article, I would like discuss the content of your resume. I’m going to describe three rules that I made up to guide your resume’s content.

Building a Software Career in an LLM World

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 06:25:00 -0600

TL;DR

Getting an entry-level software job is harder now than at any time in at least the last decade.

Building a career in software is (and always has been) hard, but highly rewarding if you succeed.

The key is to take ownership of both your work and your career trajectory.

In this article, I am going to discuss how to build a career in the software industry. We will explore career tracks, and discuss the attributes needed to become a senior software engineer. Then I will provide my view of how LLMs will affect the software engineering industry and job market.

Vibe Coding Doesn't Require LLMs

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 06:25:00 -0600

I recently read I Know When You’re Vibe Coding by Alex Kondov in which he described certain characteristic “smells” of vibe-coded software. For example, he points to LLMs proclivity to pave their own path and go against established patterns within a project.

The article resonated with me, but I realized that it resonated with me at a deeper level than just explaining my interactions with LLM-written software. I realized that I’ve seen these “smells” before in pre-LLM software (especially that written by students).

7 Things I've Learned After 7 Years as a Software Engineer

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 06:25:00 -0600

A few months ago, I was asked to give the keynote address at the BlasterHacks hackathon hosted at Mines by their ACM chapter. I wasn’t quite sure what would be interesting to talk about for the keynote, so I asked some friends. Byron suggested that I either talk about hackathon advice or career advice. Since I was giving a hackathon keynote, I decided to focus my presentation on hackathon advice. I went to six hackathons while I was a student at Mines, and won prizes at all but one of them so I felt I had something interesting to say about the topic.

What Happens After You Push?

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 06:25:00 -0600

In this article we are going to be investigating how the code you write gets to your users. This article is intended for consumption by computer science and software engineering students to provide insights into technologies and processes you might encounter in industry. This will be focused specifically on software delivery in web-based SaaS offerings rather than more traditional software delivery methods such as those seen in embedded systems. Every software project has different process for building, testing, and deploying to users and I’m not going to discuss every possible technology which might be used for each of these steps. Rather, I’m going to be describing what kinds of software might be used. I’ll describe how these systems affect the day-to-day work of software engineers, and I’ll also provide some thoughts on how you might integrate some of these ideas into your own personal projects.

Is Getting A Master's Degree in Computer Science Worth It?

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 06:37:50 -0600

“Master of Science in Computer Science”, it sounds so grand, doesn’t it? But is it worth it? I’m writing this post to give my perspective on whether getting a master’s degree is worth the effort and money. I’m assuming that you are currently in a computer science undergraduate program and are considering whether to continue on to get a computer science master’s degree. I want to be very clear, this post is my opinion only.