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Articles by Marco Sbragi
Stochastic Parrot or Alien Mind? What Really Is An LLM?
Note: This article is a developer-focused adaptation of my original blog post in Italian. You can read the full, in-depth personal reflection here: Il pappagallo stocastico on Nospace.
Stochastic Parrot or Alien Mind?
Note: This article is a developer-focused adaptation of my original blog post in Italian. You can read the full, in-depth personal reflection here: Il pappagallo stocastico on Nospace.
Is History Repeating Itself? From the PC Era to the AI Era: A Developer’s Take on the Hype and Healthy Skepticism
Note: This article is a developer-focused adaptation of my original blog post in Italian. You can read the full, in-depth personal reflection here: La storia si ripete? on Nospace. Every time we transition through a major technological shift—from the steam engine to personal computers—we witness the exact same arena. One side screams about imminent miracles, while the other predicts the end of human work.
Beyond AI: The Solitude of the Developer and the Search for True Human Connection
Lately, I've been doing some deep personal reflection. I'm talking about myself, I hope no one misunderstands, on how pervasive the use of AI has become in my daily development workflow. Through a bit of self-analysis, I've discovered some interesting dynamics. Dependencies often arise from the desire to fill a void. But what kind of void does an experienced developer like me face? As a professional, I have the skills.
Code Is Craft
I've been reading several posts on Dev.to lately that struck a chord with me, confirming that I’m not alone in my perspective. IT professionals have long been viewed as purely rational beings, relying solely on logic and reason as their only tools—and often carrying that same mindset into their daily lives. I would like to challenge this belief, at least from my perspective and for those who share it.
Docker on WSL2: Why I Ditched Docker Desktop for a Linux "Sandbox"
I've always developed in a Windows environment, but I've always been fascinated by the Linux world, so much so that most of my projects were then deployed on Linux. What's always disappointed me, however, is how Windows handles the file system with heavy loads related to databases or uncompiled runtime code. For this reason, despite developing in Windows for many years, I've used Linux virtual machines (VMWare or VirtualBox) only for database servers.
"Dead Man's Float" Approach To Surviving the Wave
Today, I want to talk about something that has absolutely nothing to do with code, system engineering, or software architecture. Or maybe, if we look closely enough, it has everything to do with it. We live and work in chaotic times. Sure, today’s modern toolsets and AI assistants allow us to offload some of the tedious, day-to-day syntax, making the core technical work slightly more relaxed. Yet, anyone in our industry knows the harsh truth: burnout is always lurking just around the corner.
Software Development as a Philosophical Act: Beyond Syntactic Sugar
Recently, a reader named Alton Zheng left a comment on my previous post, asking a challenging question: How do you approach teaching or mentoring others to maintain an "old school" engineering mindset in today’s AI-driven environment? This made me reflect deeply on my years as an instructor.
700+ Followers, 800+ Reads in 3 Months: Maybe "Old School" Engineering Still Resonates
I was looking at my DEV dashboard recently, and I am genuinely moved. In the last three months, I’ve recorded approximately 850+ reads, and 750+ of you have decided to follow my journey. That is a nearly 1:1 ratio between readers and followers—a statistic I never expected. In an industry often obsessed with the "next big thing," seeing that a traditional, "old school" approach to engineering resonates so strongly is both surprising and deeply rewarding.
Beyond the Prompt: Why Experience Still Matters
My profile: 40 years of IT evolution My name is Marco and I am an IT professional with 40 years of experience spent across software development, analysis, and architecture. Technically I am retired, but I continue to dedicate myself to code to keep my mind active and to give back to a community that has given me so much. Today, I do not look at innovation with suspicion, but with the methodological rigor of someone who can distinguish a passing trend from a paradigm shift.
Beyond the 8x Productivity Myth: A 40-Year Perspective on Recursive AI and the "Craft" of Engineering
I started my professional journey in 1986. It was the era of Honeywell systems, Commodore 64s, and developing management software in DataFlex on Concurrent-CPM. Back then, "compute" was a luxury; we planned every line of code because a single compilation could take enough time to grab a coffee—or two. Fast forward to 2026. I am reading the latest Anthropic paper, "When AI builds itself".
LLM-Manager: Orchestrating Ollama and Llama.cpp with Pure Bash
LLM-Manager is a lightweight, modular Bash suite with a dual JSON/Interactive interface designed to manage local and remote inference engines across Linux and WSL2. When I started experimenting with Large Language Models (LLMs) to build an On-Premise RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) application, I hit a massive roadblock: environment fragmentation.
GemmaLink: Your Private Eye Assistant
This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Build with Gemma 4 What I Built Most local AI setups are currently a dependency nightmare, forcing users into heavy Python environments, massive CUDA toolkits, or complex Docker configurations. I built GemmaLink to achieve the exact opposite: a "Zero-Cloud", local-first assistant that turns your smartphone into a targeted vision sensor for local VLMs, running entirely on a standard PC with a single-file, plug-and-play binary.
Clean AI Development
My Manifesto for the Senior Architect I’ve been writing software for over 40 years. To me, Large Language Models (LLMs) are just the next step in the evolution of development: they are semantic compilers. But if you treat an AI like a magic oracle, it gives you "average" code, which usually means spaghetti. To get senior-level output, you need a senior-level methodology. I call mine Clean AI Development.
The Senior Architect Simulator: How I hacked Copilot to hate my code
This is a submission for the DEV April Fools Challenge What I Built The Senior-Architect-as-a-Service (SAaaS) v1986.04.01 After 40 years of writing software, I’ve realized that modern AI is far too polite. It’s "helpful." It tells you your "bouncing buttons" and "Tailwind-bloat" are good ideas. Real engineering isn't about being nice; it's about protecting the heap from incompetent abstractions.
DB data migration is a pain
When a client tasked me with migrating data from MySQL to PostgreSQL (and later Oracle), I conducted an extensive search for existing open-source solutions. While there are excellent commercial tools available, I found a gap in the open-source market for something that was both simple and highly functional without excessive overhead. At the time, I was working extensively with Java and JDBC.
AI coding philosophy
Since I started using AI for development, I've immediately noticed several problems along with the many benefits. This is especially true when projects aren't simple standalone or disposable tools. If you develop complex projects with dozens of modules and/or services that interact with each other, you'll quickly notice code redundancy and unwanted repetition. It's a bit like going back to the mythical days of copy and paste.
Angular Bootstrap
Why You Should "Pull Your App Up by Its Own Bootstraps" The English idiom "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps" (in Italian: tirarsi su per le stringhe degli stivali) describes an impossible task: lifting yourself off the ground by pulling your own laces. In software engineering, however, bootstrapping is very real. It’s that critical moment where an application loads its configuration, sets up its environment, and prepares itself for the user—all before the first component even renders.
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