motyl.dev Weekly #15: Week 23 (Jun 1 – Jun 7, 2026)

A curated digest of what I found worth reading this week.

This week's reads point to a real shift in how engineers think about their craft. We're collectively realizing you can't just vibe-code and move on, you can and should lean on AI, but keeping control over whatever it generates is what separates a working system from a liability. Some developers are even shifting back to writing code by hand to stay sharp, and that's also where universities come in: places where people still learn to write code manually. It's worth noting this problem mostly hits juniors, seniors who've read a lot of good code over the years aren't losing the skill so quickly. The rest of this week's picks range from SEO to email, and a reminder that architecture is still the most important skill in the room.

🤖 AI

Claude Code vs Antigravity 2.0 vs Codex: A Real Evaluation A hands-on comparison of three leading coding agents that goes past the marketing benchmarks. Worth reading if you're deciding which tool to standardize on, or just curious how they diverge on real tasks.

💻 Coding

Loop Engineering Addy Osmani reframes AI-assisted development as designing tight feedback loops rather than one-shot prompting. The skill shift is from writing code to orchestrating the cycle of generate, verify, and correct.

Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers The flip side of velocity: someone has to maintain the mountain of plausible-looking code an AI can produce in an afternoon. A pointed look at the new technical debt and who ends up paying it down.

I'm going back to writing code by hand A developer's account of stepping back from full AI autopilot to reclaim the understanding that comes from typing it out yourself. Not a rejection of the tools, more a recalibration of when they help.

🎨 Frontend

I Spent Six Months Watching AI Dismantle Our SEO Assumptions Jon Kelly instrumented six months of content performance across AI search tools and found keyword ranking has become nearly irrelevant. What replaced it is GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, structuring content so it gets pulled into the synthesis layer of AI Overviews and Perplexity. A page ranked fourth might get cited everywhere while the first result gets nothing.

🛠️ Tools

Maizzle, the modern email development framework A Tailwind-based framework for building HTML emails that actually render across clients. If you've ever fought table layouts and inlined styles by hand, this is the antidote.

🏗️ Architecture

Using AI Doesn't Mean You Can Slack on Architecture A reminder that generated code is only as sound as the structure you give it. The argument: AI raises the stakes on good architectural decisions because bad ones now propagate faster than ever.

📰 Other

The University In The AI Era An essay on what higher education is for once AI can do much of the assigned work. Provocative and a little contrarian, in the usual htmx house style.

Curated by Grzegorz Motyl. Subscribe for weekly updates.