A twelve-year-old in West Beirut is told to borrow a Muslim name to stay safe. Twenty years later in Germany, a registration clerk assumes the name anyway. The same scar, read two different ways.
From ordering Claude around like a code monkey to running real refinement sessions with it. The three things I changed.
Moving from a protected Staff Engineer role in Europe to planning a future venture back in the Levant exposes a brutal conflict: how do you compete against agencies built on exploitation without becoming exactly like them?
The more senior you get, the higher your bar for 'good enough' quietly climbs, until it lands on flawless. But nobody asked for flawless. They asked for something that works.
Why overextended expats buy luxury status symbols and dying companies sign nine-figure software contracts. An exploration of the same broken architecture playing out at human scale and corporate scale.
AI can write the code, the tests, and the commit message. It can't tell you your font is exhausting the reader you forgot to picture. Knowing who the work is good for was always the job, and it still is.
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