August 2026 - The Seeley Coder

Twenty years in software has taught me one thing: every generation swears the current abstraction will be the one that finally eliminates programmers. Compilers, COBOL, 4GLs, no-code — none of them did. So when people say AI will end software engineering, I think about what actually happened last time.

I’ve been in this field for over twenty years, and in that time I’ve watched a lot of technologies show up promising to revolutionize the industry. Some of them actually did. Most didn’t. Each time, people proclaim that every software engineer is about to lose their job. So even though I’ve been using chat-based AI for a while now, I was slow to touch the newer agentic coding tools. Call it stubbornness, call it healthy skepticism, call it whatever you want — I just wasn’t in a hurry.

A 5-second page load survived a moved-off-Docker-Desktop UAT deploy, three red herrings (CPU governor, IPv6, disk contention), a crash-looping RabbitMQ broker, a silent Redis hang, and a one-digit port typo. The actual culprit: host.docker.internal doesn’t auto-resolve on native Linux Docker Engine like it does on Docker Desktop.

I spent two days chasing a 5-second page load that had no business existing. Along the way I blamed the CPU governor, IPv6, disk contention, and a laundry list of side projects running on the same box. All of those theories were reasonable. None of them were it. The real answer was one bad assumption baked into a couple of connection strings, and it wore three different disguises before I finally cornered it. The gist of it: host.docker.internal is a liar (on Linux).

Here’s the whole mess, in order, mistakes included.

Month: August 2026

Every Software Engineer Is About to Lose Their Job. Again.

host.docker.internal Is a Liar (On Linux)