Sumin Yu

With coding agents it doesn't make sense not to have a software engineer on basically every team and every company now. The amount of leverage you can get with a single hire is tremendous.

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pro tip: teach your coding agent to make small commits. add pre-commit hooks in the same way you used conventional commits. pretty rad.

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The recruiting in tech has been an absolute mess lately, from "check out this repo" scrapers/hacks & fake positions with companies that don't exist to minimum requirements that look like a whole engineering department & ones that ask senior/staff engineers to do l33tcode assignments. I wanted to share a recent experience with an application to a senior position at a company - not going to name them, but they're a large player in the recruiting/ATS arena. Getting a rejection email is something that you eventually get used to with experience & it doesn't bother you too much, there's a lot of candidates you're competing against & the best course of action is simply asking for feedback regarding your application - if you're lucky, they might answer you with constructive criticism that you can apply in your applications going forward. You could imagine my surprise when an email came through, not because it was a "we decided to go with someone else", but because it already contained some feedback for me! Fantastic, I can use this to improve. Or so I thought. As my eyes glazed over the list of things that were highlighted as a potential mismatch & that they "can't specifically say which apply to your background", I was... stumped, at first. Analyzing the points one by one, I realized none of them applied to my background or experience. Now, I understand that sometimes there can be contention or ambiguity in this regard, but these were things that would've been obvious to anyone that even looked at the resume for more than 5 seconds. Then it hit me - it's highly probable nobody actually did. While it's not uncommon to have recruiters use AI tools within their ATS systems to parse through massive amounts of applicants & have a template rejection reply, this one rubbed me wrong - because it was veiled as some constructive feedback. At least the "no" templates are obvious & as unfortunate as they are, the applicants understand them as an industry solution to large amounts of responses required. This one was pretending to be something it isn't & insulting, to be completely honest. Nevertheless, to try to exclude my own bias, I decided to ask for a second opinion. I took my resume, their response & my analysis of it and chucked it into Claude AI to see if it's valid or am I just being a biased crybaby. My electron-brained friend not only confirmed I was 100% correct, but crafted a conclusion I couldn't have written better myself. See the first reply for what Claude said.

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PSA: if you are building software and not using Claude Opus 4.5, you are missing out. I mean it. Going from Sonnet 4.5 to Opus 4.5 is insane. Now it’s like talking (I use tts) to a remote peer over the terminal without hand-holding before like Sonnet 4.5.

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I see so many startups claiming they want to hire elite Software Engineers, but then demanding a coding task before even having an intro call. That’s not how you attract top talent.

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Anthropic launched free courses and certificates for Claude development via Skilljar (https://lnkd.in/eKPK_Kbu). The community response has been overwhelmingly positive. As someone who uses Claude Code daily for Rails development, I'm excited to see Anthropic investing in developer education. Here's why this matters for practicing engineers: 1. Prompt engineering fundamentals - The courses cover structured prompting techniques that actually work in production. Polished system messages can significantly reduce back-and-forth iterations when debugging complex Sidekiq jobs or architecting new Rails features. 2. API integration patterns - They teach proper error handling and rate limiting for Claude API calls. This is crucial when you're building features that depend on AI responses. 3. Code review workflows - The advanced modules show how to use Claude as a thinking partner for system design, not just code generation. Using it to explore architectural tradeoffs before writing any Ruby is like having a senior developer to bounce ideas off. The certificates add credibility when clients ask about AI capabilities. But the real value is learning to prompt effectively. It's becoming as important as knowing your framework's conventions. My rule: if I can't explain the prompt strategy to a junior dev, I need to simplify it. The course structure helps with that systematic thinking - and I love it.

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