Fragments: January 22
My colleagues here at Thoughtworks have announced AI/works™, a platform for our work using AI-enabled software development. The platform is in its early days, and is currently intended to support Thoughtworks consultants in their client work. I’m looking forward to sharing what we learn from using and further developing the platform in future months.
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Simon Couch examines the electricity consumption of using AI. He’s a heavy user: “usually programming for a few hours, and driving 2 or 3 Claude Code instances at a time”. He finds his usage of electricity is orders of magnitude more than typical estimates based on the “typical query”.
On a median day, I estimate I consume 1,300 Wh through Claude Code—4,400 “typical queries” worth.
But it’s still not a massive amount of power - similar to that of running a dishwasher.
A caveat to this is that this is “napkin math” because we don’t have decent data about how these model use resources. I agree with him that we ought to.
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My namesake Chad Fowler (no relation) considers that the movement to agentic coding creates a similar shift in rigor and discipline as appeared in Extreme Programming, dynamic languages, and continuous deployment.
In Extreme Programming’s case, this meant a lot of discipline around testing, continuous integration, and keeping the code-base healthy. My current view is that with AI-enabled development we need to be rigorous about evaluating the software, both for its observable behavior and its internal quality.
The engineers who thrive in this environment will be the ones who relocate discipline rather than abandon it. They’ll treat generation as a capability that demands more precision in specification, not less. They’ll build evaluation systems that are harder to fool than the ones they replaced. They’ll refuse the temptation to mistake velocity for progress.
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There’s been much written about the dreadful events in Minnesota, and I’ve not felt I’ve had anything useful to add to them. But I do want to pass on an excellent post from Noah Smith that captures many of my thoughts. He points out that there is a “consistent record of brutality, aggression, dubious legality, and unprofessionalism” from ICE (and CBP) who seem to be turning into MAGA’s SD.
Is this America now? A country where unaccountable and poorly trained government agents go door to door, arresting and beating people on pure suspicion, and shooting people who don’t obey their every order or who try to get away? “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life” is a perfect description of an authoritarian police state. None of this is Constitutional, every bit of it is deeply antithetical to the American values we grew up taking for granted.
My worries about these kinds of developments were what animated me to urge against voting for Trump in the 2016 election. Mostly those worries didn’t come to fruition because enough constitutional Republicans were in a position to stop them from happening, so even when Trump attempted a coup in 2020, he wasn’t able to get very far. But now those constitutional Republicans are absent or quiescent. I fear that what we’ve seen in Minneapolis will be a harbinger of worse to come.
I also second John Gruber’s praise of bystander Caitlin Callenson:
But then, after the murderous agent fired three shots — just 30 or 40 feet in front of Callenson — Callenson had the courage and conviction to stay with the scene and keep filming. Not to run away, but instead to follow the scene. To keep filming. To continue documenting with as best clarity as she could, what was unfolding.
The recent activity in Venezuala reminds me that I’ve long felt that Trump is a Hugo Chávez figure - a charismatic populist who’s keen on wrecking institutions and norms. Trump is old, so won’t be with us for that much longer - but the question is: “who is Trump’s Maduro?”
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With all the drama at home, we shouldn’t ignore the terrible things that happened in Iran. The people there again suffered again the consequences of an entrenched authoritarian police state.