🎯 Taste moatintermediate⏱ 12 weeks·Software engineer, 2-10 years experience
The AI-Resistant Engineer
Move up the value chain: ship systems, judgment, and direction — the parts of engineering LLMs can't take.
LLMs are excellent at generating code that looks right. They are still poor at judgment under ambiguity, system design across long horizons, and translating fuzzy human needs into technical decisions. This tract pivots a working software engineer toward those skills explicitly. By week 12, you should be able to lead the end-to-end design of a non-trivial system, justify your tradeoffs in writing, and review AI-generated code with confidence.
What this builds
Primary moat
Taste moat
Knowing what to ship, what to leave out, what's good. AI models will keep getting better at execution; the part they're worst at is taste under ambiguity. Cultivating it is a deliberate practice.
Side-effects
🛡️ Trust moat — Buyers pick you specifically
Goals
Outcomes to drive toward over the tract
Lead one cross-team design review
Visible artifact of judgment and direction that AI can't fake on a resume.
⏱ 8 weeks
Publish 3 long-form engineering posts
Forces your taste and reasoning into the public record. Compounds reputation.
⏱ 12 weeks
Habits
Recurring practices that build the underlying skill
Daily 30-min architecture reading
Build pattern library faster than tools can — this is what AI struggles to do.
daily
Weekly tech-spec written from scratch
Practice translating ambiguous problems into technical proposals.
weekly
Resources
Curated reading the steps assume you've absorbed
Designing Data-Intensive Applications · Kleppmann
Bedrock for system-design judgment; nothing else on the market beats it.
Software Engineering at Google · Winters
What durable engineering culture actually looks like at scale.
How to use this tract
- Pick one habit and commit to it before adding the second. Stacking too many at once kills adherence.
- The two goals are sequential — the design review's output usually becomes one of the long-form posts.
- Pair this with the AI-Augmented Founder tract if you're considering going independent.
Adopt this tract
Habits and goals land in your plan. Resources go to your reading queue. Pro accounts get auto-scheduled briefings tied to the tract.