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You measure your systems with averages, your board deck is full of "AI," and you barely open your IDE anymore. Three things worth a second look — because each one is a signal, and the signal matters more than the noise.

In this solo episode, Simon makes the case for measuring at the tail instead of the mean (and why the 99th percentile is usually where the gold is), unpacks why AI washing is just cloud washing wearing a new label, and examines the quiet, seismic shift of the IDE losing its place as the developer's centre of gravity. The connective thread: when a core part of a value chain is fundamentally altered, pay attention — something is happening, and it's worth figuring out what.

Three observations, one habit of mind: know where to look.

Hosted by Simon Elisha — former AWS Chief Technologist, 35+ years in enterprise technology.

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For most of three decades, "good code" had a definition. Then ChatGPT launched, and within months the canonical principles of software engineering — KISS, DRY, YAGNI, the lot — collapsed in value almost overnight.

Simon Raik-Allen, CTO at Mindset Health and a former Monash AI researcher who spent a decade building simulators to teach machines how to code, dove head-first into the new model. In this conversation he walks through what he gave up, what he kept, and what the new skill actually is — including why AI is still bad at architecture, why he refuses to let one coding agent touch its own tests, and why he calls this moment the developer's golden age.

Guest: Simon Raik-Allen, CTO, Mindset Health.

Hosted by Simon Elisha — former AWS Chief Technologist, 35+ years in enterprise technology.

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Learn the strategies we discussed in this episode - head to https://pages.thequalifiedanswer.com/profile for our full training program.

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