by John Macdonald | Feb 23, 2026 | AI, Human, Technology, The250
One of the surface-level benefits of asking AI is its ability to do it quickly. Here’s a couple from my recent history: “Fix this error…” “Write a bash script that recursively finds all of the log files in the given directory and sorts them by creation time into... by John Macdonald | Feb 21, 2026 | Human, Leadership, The250
If companies had no problems, they’d need no employees. If people had no problems, they’d need no products or services. And those two statements relate circularly. Your job, product, or service has one purpose: fix a problem. First, you gotta find it. Share this:... by John Macdonald | Feb 20, 2026 | Human, Leadership, Technology, The250
I’m both a software engineer and an electrical engineer. Here are some things we say (a lot) to the marketing and product teams. “That won’t work.” “It can’t do that.” “That’s impossible.” We say these things because we believe our job is to be the source of truth. We... by John Macdonald | Feb 18, 2026 | AI, Human, Leadership, The250
Struggle first on your own. Then pull in AI. David Epstein wrote a great article about whether AI is rotting our brains, based on an MIT study. I wrote about it also. Spoiler Alert: It depends. Basically, start with yourself, rather than starting with AI. The best... by John Macdonald | Feb 17, 2026 | AI, Human, Leadership, Technology, The250
When I first started The250, my writing and publishing were 100% manual. Here’s the original workflow for The250: I’d start with a topic (or a few) that I’d been thinking about. If necessary, do some research. Open Grammarly, start writing. Iterate in Grammarly until... by John Macdonald | Feb 16, 2026 | AI, Human, Technology, The250
A former colleague of mine posted on LinkedIn that he sent 25000 prompts to AI 2025 to help him learn whether AI can help design complex ICs. Spoiler alert: Yes, of course. I estimate I’ve probably sent double or triple that many prompts over the 2.5 years I’ve been...