Viewing profile — et1337

Throwing my hat in the ring, I think passkeys were also invented by engineers with zero understanding of the average developer: https://etodd.io/2026/04/06/passkeys-are-too-hard/

This is the most interesting study I’ve seen: https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap Funny enough, it basically says the exact same thing about software engineering that TFA…

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Perhaps my "reject the premise" comment was a bit too provocative. I didn't intend to start an argument. I wanted to share a story of a person who was put in the position you descr…

I am not able to find it now, but there was an amazing story recently from the 60s or 70s where an engineer was in exactly this position. His team was building a new, complex, ambi…

Folks have been saying “things are different now, the agents are now compounding success instead of error” for at least a year now, but I just don’t see it. I was lucky enough to r…

Can’t wait for CGP Grey’s review of this flag

> prompting for test-driven development is not the same as enforcing code coverage thresholds in your build tool Are they actually different? I would guess they have roughly the sa…

Making normal things feel weird is basically the whole premise of the delightful webcomic Strange Planet: https://www.instagram.com/nathanwpylestrangeplanet

Asking random people to write SVG gives even worse results

Oh no, I’ve definitely experienced that, it’s terrible. But that situation makes me wish for more agency (for example, talking to customers directly), whereas it seems to make othe…

I’ve never understood engineers who complain about vague specs… if the spec was complete, it would be code and the job would be done already! Getting a 20 page spec delivered from …

Wow, thanks for that, TIL! I’m definitely a code lumper.

I think all three problems are really one problem under the hood: Are these two things actually the same thing, or they separate?

The saddest part about Kubernetes is… after you set it all up, you still need a hacky deploy.sh to sed in the image tag to deploy! And pretty soon you’re back to “my dear friend yo…

Jujutsu has a concept of mutable vs immutable commits to solve this. Usually everything in a remote branch is immutable. To work on a branch, I track it and that makes it mutable.

Thousands of keystrokes saved by not having to type “man syscall”… and millions of hours lost by confused folks like OP (and myself)

I’ve been driving Bluefin DX for a year or two. On the plus side, it works absolutely flawlessly. This is the longest I’ve ever run a Linux distro without a Nvidia driver update ca…

No encapsulation… huge functions with tons of local variables shared between closures… essentially global state in practice. I think ant the time, objects with member variables fel…

I also think there’s an interesting effect when cool functional language features like currying and closures are adopted by imperative languages. They make it way too easy to creat…

Right, there’s no silver bullet. I think all I can do is increase the feedback bandwidth between my brain and the real world. Regular old stuff like linters, static typing, borrow …

I think the worst case is actually that the LLM faithfully implements your spec, but your spec was flawed. To the extent that you outsource the mechanical details to a machine trai…

Turn off your watch history. It disables the front page and shorts, but you can still watch any video you want and also follow your subscriptions. You still get recommendations nex…

This was a fun one today: % cat /Users/evan.todd/web/inky/context.md Done — I wrote concise findings to: `/Users/evan.todd/web/inky/context.md`%