What I'd Learn Instead of Coding in 2027

🚀

1. Verification: reading code you didn't write and knowing whether it's actually right. You give three questions to ask in every Java review: what happens with 100 times more data, what happens when something your code calls is slow, and is this actually running in a transaction.

2. Judgment: deciding what to build and, just as important, what not to build. Your example is Amazon Prime Video moving one monitoring service from microservices to a monolith and cutting infrastructure cost by over 90%.

3. Managing agents: treating the agent like a developer who joined today, with rules in "CLAUDE.md", small tasks, and tests and CI checks as the real contract.

4. Building production systems: system design, DevOps and AI engineering. You suggest learning all three in one project: take a Spring Boot app, put it in Docker, add a pipeline, deploy it, add metrics and an alert, add one AI feature, practise a rollback, then break it on purpose.

5. Curiosity that ships: what Peter Steinberger calls high agency. Instead of keeping up with every model and launch, build and ship a project that excites you.

2 comments

What I'd Learn Instead of Coding in 2027