Lisi Hocke

AI Increases Output by 10x. Especially Stress. Open LinkedIn or YouTube on any given day and you'll find someone confidently explaining that engineers now produce 10x the code thanks to AI. Ten times! Let it be five times. Doesn't matter. And companies are drawing the logical conclusion. If one engineer does more work by herding AI agents, you need fewer engineers. The code practically writes itself. Every bottleneck on the way gets mitigated by removing roles and people.

AI gives your engineers x-time output. So you fire people. Push faster. Ship bugs with confidence. And watch your ops team burn at 2am. The defects didn't disappear. They just arrived later, at a higher cost. To the whole team and company. Slow down, zoom out and scale the whole system.

Friction-Maxxing, or The Case for Elbow Grease My friend Maaike Brinkhof recently wrote a post called "They will not break me." Her point, in a nutshell: the more they push her to offload her work to an LLM, the more she grabs pen and paper, takes her time to think, and does her work slowly and thoroughly. And it finally kicked me into writing this piece that's been bouncing around in my head for a while.

The best devs I know are lazy in the smart way. But AI is making us lazy in the dumb way. Like cleaning products that promise no scrubbing needed, we're skipping the elbow grease. Problem is, friction is how we learn. Time to learn how to distinguish necessary friction from unnecessary.

Pentagon Refuses to Say If AI Was Used to Select Elementary School as Bombing Target Did the US military use Anthropic's Claude to select targets in its weekend operations in Iran, with devastating results?

Please, please stop supporting gen AI companies. It's not worth it. futurism.com/artificial-intel...

This is anecdotal, but every time I say I have a bad feeling about something

(See: Elon and companies, alleged grassy knoll ear shots, LLMs, cryptocurrency, Gamergate, project 2025)

And I get tech people yelling at me in the comments,

Within two years I'm proven extremely right.

It feels like Proton is engaging in very intentionally deceptive marketing because they know most of their customers don't understand enough about legal process to know what any of this actually means.

Thread (1/6): 🧵

International Women's Day - RESOURCES | United Nations

This is a reminder that building inclusive environments in tech and cyber security still requires intention, support and action.
The first step is to learn more about the problems and inequalities that still occur today.
Here is material from the UN about the topic:
www.un.org/en/observanc... 2/2

The image shows a digital drawing of two monkeys. They look similar but not the same as the Open Security Conference mascot named Osco. Both are sitting on the ground next to each other, smiling at us with rosy cheeks. The one on the left is a light brown monkey with a red flame on top of their head and at the tip of their tail, as well as bright red eyes. They are hugging a lock in the shape of a purple and white flame.  The other one on the right is a dark brown monkey with a blue flame on top of their head and at the tip of their tail, as well as dark blue eyes. They are holding a basketball. They wear dark blue nail polish and their left ear shows a silver earring connected by a thin chain to a piercing in their upper ear.

Today is the International Women's Day.
Let's be mindful that inequality and oppression do not stop with women. They also affect other underrepresented groups and many people belong to more than one of them. 1/2

[lisi] [naz] [uli]

#InternationalWomensDay #inclusion #IWD2026 #intersectional

Vibe Coding is Like Groundhog Day Vibe coding reminds me of micro-managing a talented junior developer. Except it's worse. Because the junior eventually learns. The junior starts anticipating your expectations, picks up patterns, develops judgment. The AI? You explain the same basics over and over. Every. Single. Task. Yes, I know about context files and skills and custom commands. I use them myself. But let's be honest here, every task you hand to an AI still needs to contain everything.

LLMs don't learn, they're not deterministic, and reviewing their output is a full-time job. Running multiple agents in parallel without proper supervision? That's not velocity. That's negligence with extra steps.

This is a good thread. The context is relevant for professionals who work in tech. But I think there are some interesting things here for anybody who's trying to wrap their heads around "videcoding" and what the actual impact is.

Not sure everything here resonates with me. But good analysis.

The New York Times Slurs Filled a Chat Created by a Republican Party Official in Florida After the secretary of the Miami-Dade County Republican Party created the chat for college students, it devolved into slurs against Black and Jewish people.

Slurs spoke themselves unto the mouths of young GOP members again! I just hope that they're all OK!🤡

Slurs emitted themselves fully formed, from the fingertips of innocent far-right people! That must have been terrifying for them! 🤡

Pray for those that survived spontaneous chat room devolution! 🤡

CN transmisia transphobia
They won't rest until there are no more trans people.

This isn't just true for the US, in Germany there are also repeatedly attempts to create lists of trans people. No good ever comes from putting people on lists, there are more than enough precedents in history.

Vibe Coding and the Return of Throwing Stuff over the Fence I touched on this topic in my last post. I want to elaborate on this phenomenon some more. Testers, remember the old days? Developers on one side, testers on the other. A fence between them, and code flying over it like a catapult delivery. "Here, we're done. Go find the bugs." No context, no conversation, no shared understanding. Just a lobbed artifact and a prayer.

Vibe coding brought the old dev-tester silo back. Except now engineers are the ones getting half-baked deliverables thrown over the fence. One person + AI agents won't replace a cross-functional team. "You need the full package, man!" New post ✍️

Also, seems they do appreciate fun hands-on group exercises to gain experience with things and share knowledge to help each other grow. We're off to a good start to co-create this community and I'm already curious where our shared journey will lead us. 😊 #AppSec 2/2

Facilitated the first of our monthly #SecurityChampion meetups today and it was a total success! 🤩🎉 Loved how many folks showed up and also started to engage more among each other - not taken for granted given our current culture. 1/2

I hate the re-soloing of development. We were so close to learning social skills, creating community, encouraging creativity & purpose, & applying empathy. Easier to manage if each of us is so busy with our genieswarms that we don't have time to talk & reflect.

Context is the System – What AI Prompting and Systems Thinking Have in Common There is a quote I want to come back to, from Elisabeth Hendrickson: "The word 'context' is shorthand for the cumulative effect of all the past decisions that we cannot change now." Lately I've been thinking about it from a completely different angle. Not in the retrospective sense of "how did we get here", but in a prospective sense. What context do I need to provide, so that someone, or something, can make a good decision going forward?

Providing context to an AI is the same as describing the system in Systems Thinking. No context, generic answer. Good context, more useful answer. It's that simple.
Because, you know, IT DEPENDS!

Reminder.

Today's racial wealth gap is wider than in the 1960s Average wealth in America has grown over the past 50 years, but not at the same rate for everyone. Wealth gaps, especially between whites and non-whites, are growing. In 2013, the average white family...

There are *more* innocent Black people unfairly incarcerated today than there were in 1960. Hundreds of thousands more. 🤦🏿‍♂️

The racist gap in wealth *widened* between 1960 and 2013. 🤦🏿‍♂️

Segregation is *increasing* rather than decreasing in over 100 US cities. 🤦🏿‍♂️

There are a lot of things wrong with this. (Like a lot of things).

But what stood out to me was "llms don't feed and validate narcissists". Like they absolutely do? These things feed you back exactly what you wanna hear. By design.

Don't use ai for therapy. Full stop. Don't do it.

Michelle Yeoh plays several characters in this short film set in Penang.

The codeswitching (language and body language) based on status / environment / character is nuanced and reflects a broad range of the Malaysian Chinese city life experience that I have been a part of.

I also love that […]

Welcome to Mount Stupid or The Illusion of Expertise If you think that the Mount Everest base camp can be a crowded place, you have not yet been to the top of Mount Stupid. And why is there a parallel between AI and woodworking? Let's find out. Mount Stupid is this virtual place that someone tends to reach when learning about a new topic. They start looking into it, and experience a steep learning curve.

AI coding tools make Mount Stupid a very crowded place. Everyone thinks now they know how to build software.
10 years ago I talked TestBash Brighton about the Dunning-Kruger effect. Today this phenomenon has reached new heights. Thanks to everyone thinking they are now software engineers!

All war is bad. Civilians get hurt the most. Mostly children.

And that's without this level of depravity.

👨🏻‍💼Sir, we recommend a daytime strike. 9:40 am to be precise.

👴🏻I thought we strike at night? Aren't all the high priority targets in the bunker?

👨🏻‍💼High priority ones, yes sir. But this target moves around. We know where he will be at 9:40 am.

👴🏻How do we know?

👨🏻‍💼He... drops his daughter off at school

Very much looking forward to SoCraTes UK this year! See you there? :)

SoCraTes UK - Tickets Join us for another year of SoCraTes UK happening on June 18th - 21st! The event is hosted at Milton Hill House, UK which is surrounded by 22 acres of landscaped grounds and forest, delivering…

...because tickets are on sale for SoCraTes UK 2026! socratesuk.org/tickets.html

We're meeting 18th to 21st June at our lovely countryside venue, @Milton Hill House in Oxfordshire. We're also delighted to announce the training day is back 👩🏻‍🏫on the Thursday.

SoCraTes UK - Tickets Join us for another year of SoCraTes UK happening on June 18th - 21st! The event is hosted at Milton Hill House, UK which is surrounded by 22 acres of landscaped grounds and forest, delivering…

Have you heard of the SoCraTes events? These are software crafting open spaces that happen across the world, in beautiful surroundings and with lovely people. So if you’re making plans for 2026 yet, now’s the time to brighten up your February and give yourself something to look forward to...

We can't even get people to get off Facebook and Twitter for their own good. I stopped expecting them to grasp geopolitical trends. I haven't yet found the right message that makes the average person start to understand why things are so messed up.

Yep.

This sad tale is the most American story ever.

You have a non-violent refugee, in need of help.

You have racist neighbors, calling the cops on him.

You have violent cops, beating him for "not complying" by not dropping his "weapon" (walking stick) then claiming they were hurt.

Then abuse by ICE.

🤷🏿‍♂️The backflips white people go through to try to justify police killing unarmed Black people for no reason while opposing ICE killing unarmed white people for no reason, is something quite amazing to observe.

Cops have killed 141 people so far this year. It's not even March yet.