🤖 Skills AI Can't Match

And knowing where your salary comes from

Author

Travis Media
April 08, 2025

Hey everybody!

This week we’re talking about the messy reality of AI in engineering, why understanding how your work makes money still matters, and some hard-earned lessons from switching off Next.js.

Let’s dive in!

Quick Links

🧠 The role of developer skills in agentic coding
AI coding tools are getting sharper, but not everyone's cheering. Some say devs might be obsolete soon, others aren't buying it. Concerns around sloppy AI code and the steep learning curve for juniors are real, but there are still key human skills that AI can’t replace, yet. And those are exactly what we need to double down on training.

💵 Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
Too many engineers are stuck in a broken mindset, doing work that feels righteous but doesn't move the needle. You’ll hear stories like, “I focused on tech debt and got laid off,” or “I crushed an open-source project and still didn’t get promoted.” Here's the hard truth: tech companies exist to make money, and your work is valued only if it contributes to that goal. This blog post nails the connection between engineering work and profit, and why ignoring that link can cost you your job.

🎤 What it's like to interview a software engineer preparing with AI
Eric Lu from Kapwing just had a wild interview experience, one that shows the risks of over-relying on AI prep. The candidate seemed solid at first, but mid-interview, things fell apart. When pressed, they admitted: they’d used AI to prep everything. Interview ended right there. This post dives into how Eric caught it, and why real understanding still matters.

📈 Sam Altman says AI will make coders 10x more productive, not replace them
Job anxiety is surging as generative AI barrels ahead, with reports suggesting over half of banking roles could be automated. Coding? Many think it's first on the chopping block. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang even said it might already be "dead." His advice? Pivot to fields like biology or manufacturing. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman is walking it back, saying it’s not about replacing devs, but making them 10x more productive.

➡️ Why We Moved off Next.js
The Documenso team kicked things off with Next.js, it was fast, familiar, and helped them ship quickly. SSR, routing, and community support? Check. But as they leaned into newer features like Server Actions and the App Router, things started breaking. Debugging got murky, builds failed mysteriously, and developer morale dipped.

By early 2025, they’d had it. They switched to React Router, a more explicit, no-magic alternative that brought clarity and control. The result? A smooth migration and an instantly better dev experience.

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7 Essential Apps for ANY Kubernetes Cluster

If you're interested in building out a homelab Kubernetes cluster this year, I want to share with you the first 7 Tools you need to install in it.

This is a base set of apps that should be in place to make everything in a Kubernetes cluster operate in a way that mimics what you may see out there in the real world.

Until next week,

Travis.

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