Denis Stetskov articles - 11 total
Why Annual Reviews Don't Have to Be Bullshit
This week I ran annual reviews for six engineers. No awkward silences. No fishing for examples. No...
The Perfect Grammar That Defeats Us: Why AI Doesn't Need to Be Smart to Win
GPT-4 versus humans at political persuasion. The result: AI wins by 82%. Not through psychological...
From Cancer Cures to Pornography: The Six-Month Descent of AI
In March, Sam Altman promised AI would cure cancer. In October, he promised verified erotica: six...
The Systems That Survive: Four Years of War and the Math of Crisis Leadership
It’s 3:00 PM on October 10, 2025. I’m sitting in my apartment in Kyiv, working on my laptop, which is...
Supervising an AI Engineer: Lessons from 212 Sessions
The Moment Everything Broke Seventeen failed attempts on the same feature. Different...
The 90-Day Trial That Predicts Who Thrives (And Who Fails)
Most companies hire first and then determine if the candidate is in the proper role. We flip that...
What a Year-Long Hiring Overhaul Taught Us About Retention (Hint: It’s Not Money)
Last year, we spent 12 months completely redesigning our hiring process. Then another 6+ months...
How 4 Simple Signals in 1:1s Expose Burnout Before It Explodes
The Problem We All Know Six months ago, I sat in yet another 1:1 that felt like Groundhog...
Why Dashboards Lie And the Feedback System That Finally Gave Us the Truth
This week, two developers on my team shared feedback that highlighted a gap I’ve been working to...
The Brutal Reality of AI in Engineering: Lessons from Q3 2025
On September 29, 2025, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5. I spent that Monday running it through...
The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe
The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. Not used. Not allocated. Leaked. A basic calculator app is...