From KC-10 refuellers to centaur coding with Peter Marreck

Welcome back to I'm a Software Engineer, What Next? The podcast for devs figuring out their next move. Hosted by James Wilson and Matt Sinclair, we talk honestly about what it takes to build a meaningful career in tech.This week we're joined by Peter Marreck, who's currently consulting on AI for legal workflows. Peter's route in was not the standard one. Four years in the US Air Force as an electrical specialist on a KC-10 refueller (actively trying to avoid anything to do with computers, it didn't take), then Cornell, then web software since 2000: FactSet, Deloitte, ThredUp, Desk, a decade running his own contracting shop, then Director of Engineering at Adgenes. The Commodore Pet got him at age eight and he's been spitting ever since.In this episode, we cover:- Why he wanted to be a doctor until he touched a Commodore Pet, and why being into computers in the 80s was "social suicide"- Trust your gut, including the time someone told him not to buy Apple stock- The centaur coder: five months of collaborating with an LLM and what changed in how he thinks about design- The thin coordinator pattern: a pure Zig functional core wrapped in a CFFI so any front end can hang off it- Why LLMs are unusually good at Zig (similar to C, simple enough to grok)- Pushback on Dario Amodei: the people who'll survive are the ones who grab the surfboard, not the ones who get washed out- Dunning-Kruger as a service, and what to make of Gary Tan's G-Stack prompts- "Don't fire your engineers. Attack the backlog instead." Why this is the moment for the work that's been sitting around for two years- Cognitive surrender as a third category of thinking, and the cost of handing too much off to the model- "Idiocracy is a documentary from the future." Peter on the incompetence failure mode being scarier than the malicious oneGuest:Peter Marreckhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/petermarreck/HostsMatt: https://matthewsinclair.comJames: linkedin.com/in/james-wilson-92170656More from us:https://whatnext.dev/https://quantumfaxmachine.com/