Steve Yegge’s article about programmer burnout (“The AI Vampire”) along with Margaret Storey’s article about Cognitive Debt started an ongoing conversation about programmer fatigue and software quality—two topics that should be linked, but often aren’t. Steve argues that programming constantly with the help of agentic AI leds to burnout; it’s fast, it’s fun, but keeping […]
Personal AI doesn’t have to run your life to change it. It just must see you clearly and feed your behavior back to you in a way you can’t dodge. Once you look at AI as feedback loops instead of little butlers, the whole “agent” conversation starts to feel upside down. We’ve overrotated on agents […]
GitLab Act 2 There's a lot going on in this announcement from GitLab about the "workforce reduction" and "structural and strategic decisions" they are making with respect to the agentic era. They're "planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams". One of the most interesting things about GitLab is that they have employees spread across a large number of countries - 18 are listed in their public employee handbook but this post says they are "operating in…
Récent 6 layer harness, fully mapped out.
Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture. [...] The math only works if the LLM decreases your maintenance costs, and by exactly the inverse of the rate it adds code. If you double…
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain Excellent, angry piece by Jason Koebler on how AI writing online is becoming impossible to avoid, filtering it is mentally exhausting and it's even starting to distort regular human writing styles. I particularly liked his use of the term "Zombie Internet" to define a different, more insidious alternative to the "Dead Internet" (which is just bots talking to each other): I called it the Zombie Internet because the truth is that large parts of the internet are…
TIL: Using LLM in the shebang line of a script Kim_Bruning on Hacker News: But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave) [...] This inspired me to look at patterns for doing exactly that with LLM. Here's the simplest, which takes advantage of LLM fragments: #!/usr/bin/env -S llm -f Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle But you can also incorporate tool calls using the -T name_of_tool option: #!/usr/bin/env -S llm -T llm_time -f Write a…
Learning on the Shop floor Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack: River does not respond to direct messages. She politely declines and suggests to create a public channel for you and her to start working in. I myself work with river in #tobi_river channel and many followed this pattern. Every conversation is therefore searchable. Anyone at Shopify can jump in. In my own channel, there are over 100 people who, react…
Récent Human-in-the-Loop becomes an operational bottleneck In my previous article, ”The Missing Layer in Agentic AI,” I argued that AI agents need a deterministic execution kernel—a privileged “Kernel Space” that validates every proposed action before it touches the real world. That article focused on what happens at the execution boundary: idempotency, JIT state verification, and DFID-correlated […]
This article was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned. The article now accurately quotes from a speech delivered by Mr. Poilievre in April. [...] He did not refer to politicians who changed allegiances as turncoats in that speech. — New…
The full RL nanodegree, covered with implementation.
Breaking down what METR’s latest “time horizon” graph does and does not show
One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much better implementation someone else has already written 30 or 40 years ago; I could write a TSV-aware search and replace, or I could find out about awk and solve that entire class of problems in one fell swoop, for example. My central conceit is that this is a…
WebRTC is designed to degrade and drop my prompt during poor network conditions. wtf my dude WebRTC aggressively drops audio packets to keep latency low. If you’ve ever heard distorted audio on a conference call, that’s WebRTC baybee. The idea is that conference calls depend on rapid back-and-forth, so pausing to wait for audio is unacceptable. …but as a user, I would much rather wait an extra 200ms for my slow/expensive prompt to be accurate. After all, I’m paying good money to boil the ocean,…
Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML Thought-provoking piece by Thariq Shihipar (on the Claude Code team at Anthropic) advocating for HTML over Markdown as an output format to request from Claude. The article is crammed with interesting examples (collected on this site) and prompt suggestions like this one: Help me review this PR by creating an HTML artifact that describes it. I'm not very familiar with the streaming/backpressure logic so focus on that. Render the actual…