Hi, I’m Maroffo
Engineering leader turned hands-on builder. Writing about AI-assisted development, cloud architecture, and performance optimization.
The Word 'Permanent' Isn't in the Paper
A viral tweet says ChatGPT permanently damaged your creativity. It cites two real studies. Neither paper says that. A close reading of what got dropped between the abstracts and the post.
Cognitive Load Moved. My Pre-Work Routine Had to Move With It.
I came across the 2014 Oppezzo & Schwartz paper on Twitter this morning and went looking for the wider literature. What I found describes a pattern I had been running unconsciously for months: walking from the studio to the kitchen when stuck, a ten-minute loop to pick up my son, the dog out for a quick pee. A decade of replication, applied to AI-assisted work.
Agents Delete Good Code. Here's How I'm Stopping Them.
I went looking for token waste in my AI harness traces. Instead I found behavioral failures: agents that fear complexity, write stubs and declare victory, and silently delete code they don’t understand. I built four mechanisms to stop them.
Your AI Harness Is Hand-Crafted. That's the Problem.
Stanford’s Meta-Harness paper argues that optimizing the code around the model matters more than optimizing the model itself. I applied it to my Claude Code setup and got the first real numbers: 3,723 tokens always in context, with no evidence they’re the right ones.
From Cognitive Load to Cognitive Surrender
A Wharton paper gave a formal name to what I described three weeks ago: when AI thinks for you and you let it. The data is worse than I expected.
The Apprenticeship Is Dead. Long Live the Indie Senior.
AI creates a demographic time bomb: it increases demand for senior talent while destroying the pipeline that produces it. What replaces corporate apprenticeship is something closer to Hollywood.
Everyone Promised Shorter Workweeks. Then Came the 12-Hour Laws.
Keynes predicted 15-hour weeks by 2030. Gates says 2-day weeks within a decade. Meanwhile, Germany, Argentina, and Silicon Valley are legislating or normalizing 12-hour days. The paradox has a name, and it’s 161 years old.
AI Didn't Reduce My Cognitive Load. It Moved It.
Everyone says AI makes developers faster. My experience is the opposite: I arrive exhausted not because I wrote more code, but because I evaluated more decisions. The effort didn’t shrink. It transformed.
AI Is Breaking the Engineering Talent Pipeline
Three fractures in how we learn, hire, and distribute capability.
When Your AI's Second Brain Starts Talking Back
Three layers of knowledge integration between Obsidian and Claude Code: from write-only vault to a feedback loop that promotes patterns into skills.