The Systems Thinking Lab Newsletter
Systems thinking insights for junior engineers, every Saturday.
Written by a UC Berkeley lecturer. Free, forever.
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You can't read your way to good judgment. But every Saturday, this letter gives you a real engineering decision to reason through, so the way you think about systems gets sharper one rep at a time.
See how systems like Instagram and Stripe actually fit together, in plain terms.
Learn the tradeoffs and mental models that hold up long after the syntax changes.
One focused idea each Saturday. Short enough to finish, concrete enough to use.
Thank you for reading this letter, many of you since before the series was finished. Systems Thinking in the AI Era is the four-course series I teach:...
The most reliable part of a stack is rarely the part anyone shows off. It has no clever layer to point at. That is the whole reason it never breaks. A...
You asked an AI to help you build something, and it put the whole thing inside one service. I have written about this before: a Service is a waiter, it...
An AI Engineer job posting almost never asks you to train a model. It asks for Python. Backend services. APIs. Deployment. Say you are two years into your...
You have probably seen the claim by now: AI is coming for the junior engineer first, so if you are early in your career, or trying to become one, the...
This week I put AI agents on a real job: rewriting the bios on all eight of my social profiles. They did the work. I reviewed and approved each one from...
Nobody tells you the day the work stops arriving pre-decided. For two years the work arrives pre-decided. "Add a price filter to search." You open the...
AI is eating spec-to-code work, not the junior engineer. Judgment now gets built on purpose: the junior in the loop with the agent, before the first job.
Lately I keep circling back to the same handful of questions. What AI actually means for junior engineers. How to use it well without hollowing out your...
Last week I said judgment is the job now that output is cheap. Which leaves the obvious next question: fine, but how do you actually build judgment? Here...
AI writes the code. You make the call. I rebuilt the entire site this month around that one sentence. Here is why, and what changed. For two years the...
Everyone keeps predicting that AI eliminates the junior engineer first. I think that prediction aims at the wrong rung of the ladder. Maya is the best...
Ask an AI to build a feature. It will forget one block. Every time. Try it. Tell Claude to build video upload for your app. You will get a clean service:...
Everyone predicts AI replaces junior engineers first. The evidence points at a different rung: the mid-level role built on turning clear specs into working code.
Here is a story that is playing out on teams everywhere right now. A junior engineer ships a payment system in one afternoon. Stripe, Postgres, Redis, a...
You can know the seven blocks cold and still design the wrong system. The blocks tell you what to build. They do not tell you why. The why comes from...
An opinionated guide for engineers learning to use AI for coding. 6 levels from manual coder to parallel AI development, with self-assessment and 3 metaphors that explain why it's hard.
Hey there, I'm excited to announce two new perks exclusively for full bundle members. What's New If you purchased the 4-course bundle (or upgraded from...
Hey there, This week I want to share something that surprised me while building Course 2. Why Course 2 Starts With a Blog When I tell people the first...
Hey there, I want to share why I'm building these courses and what happened this week. The "Why" Behind Systems Thinking in the AI Era Two realizations...
How junior engineers can confidently approach complex system architecture with an intuitive, technology-agnostic framework
System design is not reserved for senior engineers. Learn practical ways junior developers can start building architectural thinking skills right now.
Why understanding and aligning with existing company infrastructure is essential for the success, scalability, and longevity of your engineering projects.
Why becoming an investigator of the problem space is essential before jumping into solutions, and how this mindset shapes better system design decisions.
How understanding and navigating technical and business constraints can propel junior engineers into a more active role in the system design process.
Why asking the right questions can set junior engineers apart in system design discussions and accelerate their path to architectural thinking.
Why end-to-end understanding is becoming extremely valuable at all software engineering levels, especially in the age of AI
The path to becoming a 10x engineer lies not in solitary coding but in amplifying the abilities of those around you through mentorship and collaboration.
