Nerds In A Basement (NIAB)

Don't miss it! Our Chief Nerd ZJ Martin is going to be speaking on the skills junior engineers can develop in the new world of AI at #AgentCamp Milwaukee on Monday April 13th. We hope to see you there!

Hey Jack Henry, we've heard you! We understand you are looking for some stellar Golang engineers to help migrate from legacy .NET implementations as well as build out some new projects. Well we have Kansas City area professionals that have this experience in spades. At a previous engagement, we proved a 90% resource reduction from doing this exact same thing in the security space, moving their backend from Java to Golang. To say the least, we are hungry to do it again! Send us a DM to connect as we would love to get your solutions implemented right!

As we’ve continued to use AI within our workflow, we have been learning more and more about the importance of rollbacks. As many posts have screamed before, organizations are looking to use AI as a force multiplier, but have the rollback processes been implemented to support AI enabled engineering? If you’re needing a sanity check of your SDLC especially around rolling back changes in a world that’s all but slowing down, let us know.! We’d love to make sure you’re ready for the possibility of a rogue agent using terraform to remove your prod environment.

Why work with a fractional software engineering team like Nerds In A Basement? Simple. You get the specialized help exactly when you need it without the downtime overhead. Need a Go expert for a backend migration? A solutions architect for that greenfield project? A founding engineer to audit your vibed out codebase? Perfect! We've got you covered. When you work with us, you get the specialist for the task at hand, not a generalist who's "pretty good" at everything. Then, once we complete the work requested, you can scale back down the resources instead of shouldering the cost. You spend a fraction of the salary of full-time engineers with no recruiter fees, no benefits to cover, and no on-boarding overhead. A simple, scalable retainer model that scales up when you're shipping and down when you're not. You get seniors as your support engineers, not mid-level developers with inflated titles. Our team has over 150 years of combined experience crossing multiple industries. We've seen the patterns, made the mistakes, and know what actually breaks in production. We're the people you'd hire if you could afford a bench of full-time staff engineers. The traditional hiring playbook doesn't work when you need help now and your problem requires specialized expertise you'll only need for a quarter or two. That's the gap fractional engineering fills. If you're stuck waiting on the "right" hire while your timeline slips, let's talk. Visit nerdsinabasement.com or DM us directly. We'll have someone reviewing your codebase next week, not next quarter.

This past weekend we hosted our inaugural Nerds In A Basement Poker Social. It was a great experience to hear about some awesome projects, share new ideas, and reconnect with some of the incredible engineering minds we have. We were also able to raise money for a local Kansas City charity, The Starfish Project Foundation. They do great work helping those that need help getting on their feet including providing food and clothes to those that need them. We can’t wait to host this event again next year and look forward to continuing to give back to the Kansas City community. If you’re looking for some quick hitting software help, the brilliant people that ran the tables are ready to solve the hard problems. Reach us at nerdsinabasement.com.

After a couple years of trial and error, here's what we have seen AI-enabled engineering actually look like in practice (not the hype version)... Our senior engineers use AI to move faster on the routine work: boilerplate code, documentation, test generation, and code review. This has freed up their focus for the hard stuff: architecture, patterns, edge cases, client-specific complexity, and making decisions. The key word is senior. A junior engineer with AI can generate a lot of code quickly. A senior engineer with AI can generate the right code quickly AND know the difference. That judgment doesn't come from a model. It comes from years of learning the hard way. This is why we built our team the way we did. AI amplifies skill. It doesn't substitute for it. If you're evaluating potential engineering partners, make sure to ask them how their team uses AI, not just whether they do. Knowing teams are using these next generation tools rather than using these tools correctly will save you headaches, hard decisions, capital, and most importantly time.

AI generates code faster than 99.99[insert how many 9's you'd like]% of humans. That's exactly why your team needs architectural and coding standards more than ever. I'm watching teams speed up development with AI tools, then slow to a crawl three months later because nobody can understand what anyone else built. Different patterns, inconsistent naming, five ways to handle errors, three different state management approaches; all generated quickly, all "working," all unmaintainable. Standards aren't about being rigid. They're about creating a shared language so your team can move fast without creating chaos. Here's what effective standards actually look like in an AI-enabled team: When an engineer uses Cursor or Copilot to generate a new API endpoint, they know it should follow the same error handling pattern as the other 47 endpoints. When AI suggests a database query, the engineer immediately checks if it matches your team's established patterns for pagination and filtering. When someone reviews AI-generated tests, they can quickly assess quality because the test structure is predictable (please use the 3 A's). Without standards, AI becomes a chaos accelerator. Every engineer generates slightly different implementations. Code reviews take longer because reviewers have to understand novel approaches every time. New engineers (or AI agents) can't learn from existing code because there's no consistency to learn from. The fastest teams aren't the ones generating the most code. They're the ones where everyone, human or AI, speaks the same architectural language. That's not a constraint on creativity. It's the foundation that makes speed sustainable. If you're looking for some help establishing these standards and enabling your engineering teams the explosive capabilities of coding with AI, reach out to us at nerdsinabasement.com and we will get you squared away.

AI didn't write that bug. You did. We have seen a pattern emerge recently: teams adopt AI coding tools, ship a large change, don't implement a testing plan or do a premortem, then blame AI when things break in production. No. You accepted code you either didn't understand, didn't test enough, or didn't think through all possible repercussions. That's on you. Here's what's actually happening: AI tools are incredibly good at generating plausible code. They'll give you something that compiles, passes basic tests, and looks reasonable at first glance. But without proper setup, context, and prompting; they don't know your system's constraints, they don't understand your data patterns, and they can't predict how this code will behave under load or when edge cases hit. Someone building with AI that doesn't have a full picture of what's needed for the system to operate is like someone with a excavator who doesn't understand how utilities are ran. You may get the result you're hoping for, you may get the opportunity to find out. A senior engineer treats AI output the same way they treat any implementation: with healthy skepticism and a checklist of things that typically go wrong. The accountability gap isn't the AI's fault. It's a judgment gap. If you don't understand the code well enough to debug it, refactor it, and explain why it works, you shouldn't be merging it. We at Nerds In A Basement understand that AI is a tool. Tools don't write bugs. Engineers who don't verify write bugs. It's important to own your code, regardless of who or what generated it. If you're looking for some help with getting your project cleaned up and production ready, reach out to us at nerdsinabasement.com

The engineering hiring equation has changed. For years, the math was simple: hire junior engineers at $50-100K, accept the learning curve and training time from your seniors, then finally scale your team. AI tools aren't democratizing engineering expertise, they're amplifying the gap between junior and senior talent. Here's what an AI-enabled senior engineer actually looks like: They're using an agent (Cursor, Claude Code, something running on a home-lab, pick your poison) to generate code 'n' times faster, but more importantly, they're reviewing and immediately spotting the subtle bugs in that generated code. They're using AI to explore architectural options in minutes, but they know which tradeoffs matter for YOUR specific constraints. They're letting AI write tests while focusing on the test patterns and strategy that actually catches the critical issues rather than giving you pretty green check-marks. Junior engineers with the same tools? They're still learning to ask the right questions, but they don't have the scars to know when the AI is confidently wrong. They haven't built the mental models to evaluate whether that "working" code will become technical debt in six months. This is why fractional senior engineers are becoming the smarter play. You get the years of battle-tested judgment, now operating at peak velocity, for a fraction of the financial and time cost of building a junior team. The AI handles the grunt work. The senior handles the hard parts: architecture decisions, code review, mentoring your team, and most importantly knowing what NOT to build. The industry shift isn't AI replacing engineers. It's AI making experienced judgment exponentially more valuable, and with organizations like us, more accessible.

Enabling engineering organizations with AI tools is difficult. Here is our Chief Nerd ZJ Martin to explain some of the headaches and ways to avoid them. If you’re looking for some help with your AI rollout, reach out to us at nerdsinabasement.com