Recent Changes

Quick but worthwhile links

Thu 07 Aug 2025 09:21 EDT

Abi Noda observes

Just met with a 2000+ eng company. Their developers are saving 2+ hours per week thanks to Copilot.

But they’re also losing:

• 3 hrs per week due to slow builds
• 4 hrs per week on dev environment toil
• 2 hrs per week waiting for code reviews

AI is not a silver bullet.

Nik Malykhin found it useful to get an AI assistant to write its own coding rules by analyzing his code, and then asking it to refine them as worked with it.

the central paradox of using AI assistants effectively: to offload cognitive work to an AI, you must first do the meta-cognitive work of codifying your own development philosophy and collaboration style.

I agree with Charity Majors that there is a valuable distinction between disposable versus durable code, and that makes a difference in how we use AI with it.

The difference between disposable code and durable code is not about whether the code was generated by AI or written by a human, or even how difficult it was to write. The cost is defined by the standards you are building to, and the rest of the software development lifecycle: how well you expect to maintain it, extend it, migrate it, understand its behavior, or fix it when it breaks. This is the expensive part of software development, the type that requires deep expertise and familiarity with your language and environment. Disposable code is cheap because you don’t even try to maintain it.

Jim Highsmith thinks that we should think of AI as Alternative Intelligence

It’s not fake intelligence, or artificial empathy, or HAL 9000 with manners. It’s something else. Something that thinks differently, not defectively.

Rod Johnson asserts that we know that memory is important to AI systems, but we forget that Domain Models are an important form of memory

Event Sourcing provides perfect episodic memory by storing the complete history of domain changes as immutable events. Every decision, every state transition, every business event is preserved with full context.

Repository patterns offer domain-focused memory interfaces that understand business concepts. A CustomerRepository knows how to retrieve customer information in ways that preserve business meaning, not just raw data.

Bounded contexts from Domain-Driven Design partition memory into semantic boundaries, preventing the concept pollution that plagues pure vector-based approaches.

Aggregates function as cohesive memory clusters with consistency boundaries—exactly what we need for reliable agent behavior.

The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence

Wed 06 Aug 2025 09:23 EDT

The productivity of knowledge workers is hard to quantify and often decoupled from direct business outcomes. The lack of understanding leads to many initiatives, bloated tech spend, and ill-chosen efforts to improve this productivity. Sriram Narayan begins an article that looks at how to avoid this by developing an intelligence of the business impact of their work across a network connecting output to proximate and downstream impact.

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How far can we push AI autonomy in code generation?

Tue 05 Aug 2025 09:53 EDT

Birgitta Böckeler reports on a series of experiments we did to explore how far Generative AI can currently be pushed toward autonomously developing high-quality, up-to-date software without human intervention. As a test case, we created an agentic workflow to build a simple Spring Boot application end to end. We found that the workflow could ultimately generate these simple applications, but still observed significant issues in the results—especially as we increased the complexity. The model would generate features we hadn't asked for, make shifting assumptions around gaps in the requirements, and declare success even when tests were failing. We concluded that while many of our strategies — such as reusable prompts or a reference application — are valuable for enhancing AI-assisted workflows, a human in the loop to supervise generation remains essential.

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Partner with the AI, throw away the code

Thu 31 Jul 2025 10:16 EDT

Matteo Vaccari shows why the common metric of AI code acceptance has big hole. An LLM can be helpful even if you throw away its code.

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Who is LLM

Tue 22 Jul 2025 13:38

It's become a common habit for developers to give Large Language Models (LLMs) a persona when working with them. I describe four of them, a stubborn donkey, a genie, a slot machine, and Uriah Heep.

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Generative AI in software and essaying

Mon 21 Jul 2025 14:58 EDT

Korny Sietsma has a great example of how using an LLM for coding is very helpful but with limitations…

and a thoughtful general essay on why the hype and the immovable skeptics are both missing the train.

While here, a professor of poetry ponders (gift link) on the value and limits of AI with writing:

One of the real challenges here is the way that A.I. undermines the human value of attention, and the individuality that flows from that.

What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work.

Three worthwhile articles yesterday

Thu 10 Jul 2025 10:58 EDT

Three articles I enjoyed yesterday:

Stephen O’Grady talks about how Gen AI tools break two common constants with developer tools: they are willing to flit between Gen AI tools and they are willing to pay for them. This implies that it’s not too late for new tools to appear, and that enterprise adoption will be slowed by a lack of consensus on which direction to go.

Pete Hodgson continues his excellent writing on Gen AI by proposing an approach to leading engineers towards an AI-assisted future, centered around a the concept of aligned autonomy. He advocates an explicit experimentation phase, followed by supporting adoption and measuring their impact.

Charity Majors reflects on her career. I really resonated with her words: “I think I’m less interested in my own happiness (whatever that means) than I am interested in doing work that feels worth doing.”

I still care about the code

Wed 09 Jul 2025 10:33 EDT

Even with LLMs, Birgitta Böckeler still cares about the code: “LLMs are NOT compilers, interpreters, transpilers or assemblers of natural language, they are inferrers.

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LLMs bring new nature of abstraction

Tue 24 Jun 2025 10:02 EDT

Like most loudmouths in this field, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the role that generative AI systems may play in software development. I think the appearance of LLMs will change software development to a similar degree as the change from assembler to the first high-level programming languages. The further development of languages and frameworks increased our abstraction level and productivity, but didn’t have that kind of impact on the nature of programming. LLMs are making that degree of impact, but with the distinction that it isn't just raising the level of abstraction, but also forcing us to consider what it means to program with non-deterministic tools.

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Expert Generalists: first three characteristics

Wed 18 Jun 2025 09:13 EDT

As computer systems get more sophisticated we've seen a growing trend to value deep specialists. But we've found that our most effective colleagues have a skill that comes from spanning many specialties. We are thus starting to explicitly recognize this as a first-class skill of “Expert Generalist”. This is the first installment of an article detailing how we think about this skill, starting with the first three characteristics of an Expert Generalist.

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Autonomous coding agents: A Codex example

Wed 04 Jun 2025 09:50 EDT

In the past few weeks, multiple “autonomous background coding agents” have been released. Birgitta Böckeler tried out giving a task to OpenAI Codex to see what she could learn. Here she describes one particular Codex run, to help us look behind the scenes, and make some observations about its contribution to our work.

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Should I still use analytics?

Tue 03 Jun 2025 09:23 EDT

I set up Google Analytics on my site in 2010, and since then use it to track page views to my site. I only care about page views, which I find useful to figure out which pages get the most traffic. It’s interesting data, and sometimes rather useful. But Google collects much more information than just page views, and it’s tracking is more intrusive than I would like. But I had other things I’d rather spend to spend my time on, so doing anything about it never made it high enough up my todo list.

But last month I finally did something, having come across some information that did I thought did what I wanted. Essentially I want things set up so that I don’t need to bother with a cookie banner because I only track things that are trackable when someone says “deny all”. Based on some google documentation, I changed my google analytics fragment to:

<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-6D51F4BDVF"></script>
<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
  gtag('consent', 'default', {
    'ad_user_data': 'denied',
    'ad_personalization': 'denied',
    'ad_storage': 'denied',
    'analytics_storage': 'denied',
    'wait_for_update': 500,
  });
  gtag('js', new Date());

  gtag('config', 'G-6D51F4BDVF');
</script>

As I understand the documentation, this should turn off the most problematic tracking, but still send a page view event. I took a look at it the following day, and everything seemed to be ok, but now, a couple of weeks later, page views reported by Google Analytics have dropped drastically. Not to zero, but to near zero.

I’ve spent a bit of time trying to figure out what’s happening. I used google tag assistant and it indicates the page view events are being sent correctly. But that doesn’t explain why I’m not seeing the page views in my Google data.

I’m not sure what to do next. I don’t want to spend too much time on this, after all I’d rather work on writing and editing. I did consider other services to do the tracking, but it looks we’re talking about $100s a month - and it’s just not worth that much to me. There are open source setups I could try an configure on my server, but again that’s effort I don’t really want to go into. Maybe I just live without analytics data.

Bliki: Say Your Writing

Wed 28 May 2025 09:50 EDT

Here's one of the best tips I know for writers, which was told to me by Bruce Eckel.

Once you've got a reasonable draft, read it out loud. By doing this you'll find bits that don't sound right, and need to fix. Interestingly, you don't actually have to vocalize (thus making a noise) but your lips have to move. ¹

This advice is for those who, like me, strive to get a conversational tone to their writings. A lot of people are taught to write in a different way than they speak, but I find prose much more engaging with this conversational tone. I imagine I'm sitting in pub, explaining the concepts to my companions. I've heard people say that when reading my work, they can hear me speaking it - which is exactly the effect I'm after.

Too often I read prose that feels flabby. Two kinds of flab stand out: corporate prose and academic prose. I often tell people that if they read their prose and it sounds like it could have come from Accenture ² , then they are doing it wrong. And, of course, the passive voice is rarely preferred. Speaking makes this flab noticeable, so we can cut it out.

In my case I find I constantly (silently) speak the words as I'm writing.

Interviewed by James Lewis at goto Copenhagen

Fri 23 May 2025 13:48 EDT

At goto copenhagen last year, my friend James Lewis interviewed me and Goto have just released the video. I talk about when I learned about iterative design from Kent Beck, the dangers of product owners interfering with business-developer communication, and writing the agile manifesto. During this he specifically asked about my essay Is Design Dead. There's also a some audience questions asking if pair programming is a bad thing for introverts like us (no), and (inevitably) the role of LLMs for programmers today.

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Refresh of Agile Threat Modeling

Tue 20 May 2025 09:20 EDT

Threat modeling is a systems engineering practice where teams examine how data flows through systems to identify what can go wrong - a deceptively simple act that reveals security risks that automated tools cannot anticipate. Often this is done by security analysts as a separate or upfront activity, but Jim Gumbley wrote an article in 2020 explaining how it could be done by teams through small and regular work.

Now Gayathri Mohan has joined Jim to rewrite the article, incorporating what both have them learned about doing and teaching this practice in the last few years. In particular they have extended their approach to perform threat modeling with platform teams.

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Building Custom Tooling with LLMs

Wed 14 May 2025 10:10 EDT

Tools that treat diagrams as code, such as PlantUML, are invaluable for communicating complex system behavior. But Unmesh Joshi often wished for an extension to walk through these diagrams step-by-step. Yet, extending established tools like PlantUML often involves significant initial setup - parsing hooks, build scripts, viewer code, packaging - enough “plumbing” to deter rapid prototyping.

He narrates now he used an LLM to build a small extension adding step-wise playback to PlantUML sequence diagrams. This illustrates how syntax design, parsing, SVG generation, build automation, and an HTML viewer were iteratively developed through a conversation with an LLM - turning tedious tasks into manageable steps.

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Coding Assistants Threaten the Software Supply Chain

Tue 13 May 2025 09:11 EDT

We have long recognized that developer environments represent a weak point in the software supply chain. Jim Gumbley and Lilly Ryan explore how agentic coding assistants expand the attack surface of software supply chains and what measures we need to do to safeguard security when using them.

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Function calling using LLMs

Tue 06 May 2025 09:02 EDT

While LLMs excel at generating cogent text based on their training data, they may also need to interact with external systems. Kiran Prakash describes how we get them to construct external function calls to do this. The LLM does not execute these calls directly, instead it creates a data structure that describes the call, passing that to a separate program for execution and further processing. The LLM's prompt includes details about possible function calls and when they should be used.

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Building TMT Mirror Visualization with LLM

Wed 30 Apr 2025 09:54 EDT

Creating a user interface that visualizes a real-world structure — like the Thirty Meter Telescope's mirror — might seem like a task that demands deep knowledge of geometry, D3.js, and SVG graphics. But with a Large Language Model (LLM) like Claude or ChatGPT, you don't need to know everything upfront. Unmesh Joshi describes how working with an LLM gave him a working prototype even when he's unfamiliar with the underlying tech.

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Additional explanatory material for the Deepseek Overview

Mon 21 Apr 2025 09:07 EDT

A couple of months ago, my colleague Shayan Mohanty published a technical overview of the series of papers describing the deepseek AI models. He's now gone through that article, adding more explanations to make it more digestible for those of us who don't have a background in building these kinds of models.

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Guiding an LLM for Robust Java ByteBuffer Code

Thu 17 Apr 2025 09:39 EDT

AI editors like Cursor can generate code with remarkable speed using LLMs, handling boilerplate and providing functional snippets for various tasks. However, when building robust systems, functional correctness is only the starting point. Code must also be safe, predictable, maintainable, and free from subtle side effects. Unmesh Joshi demonstrates, through a dialogue between a developer and an LLM, how expert guidance is crucial to transform an initial, potentially unsafe code snippet into a robust, system-ready component.

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Social Media Engagement in Early 2025

Thu 03 Apr 2025 09:41 EDT

A few years ago, whenever I published a new article here, I would just announce it on Twitter, but since the Muskover its importance has declined, and now I post updates to several services. To compare engagement on these services, I've looked at reposts, likes, and replies to two dozen of my recent posts.

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I've been kidnapped by Robert Caro

Tue 01 Apr 2025 17:22 EDT

I've always enjoyed reading, and for most of my life I've particularly enjoyed reading history. I've head many great things about Robert Caro's books, but was deterred by their size. Finally, with his first book newly available as an ebook, I decided to dip my toes in. The books are too good for me to escape.

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