Viewing profile — michaelfeathers

There's something with the same shape as Jevon's paradox - the Peltzman effect. The safer you make something the more risks people will take. Applied to AI I think it would be some…

Thanks. After I wrote it a friend said "I think you just gave people permission to do things that they would've felt bad about otherwise." I think he was right, in a way. On the ot…

The developers of JMock, the original library for Java.

This is called point-free style in Haskell. Sometimes it is called a fluent-interface in other languages.

That doesn't sound like the sort of problem you'd use it for. I think it would be used for the ~10% of code you have in some applications that are part of the critical core. UI, no…

I think we are going to end up with common design/code specification language that we use for prompting and testing. There's always going to be a need to convey the exact semantics…

The trajectory of AI is: emulating humans. We've never been able to align humans completely, so it would be surprising if we could align AI.

Chat in English? Sure. But there is a better way. Make it a game to see how little you can specify to get what you want. I used this single line to generate a 5 line Java unit test…

I think it makes sense to see friction as disincentive, the opposite of incentive.

This is a good talk about the problem: https://youtu.be/hGXhFa3gzBs?si=15IJsTQLsyDvBFnr Key takeaway, LLMs are abysmal at planning and reasoning. You can give them the rules of pla…

I always have trouble with takes like this because they are context-free. There are a wide variety of project types and development scenarios. My nuanced take is that typing is an …

Obligatory reference to the Law of Leaky Abstractions: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a... Layers work to the degree that they are trivial, but we reall…

I think it goes deeper. When people become very skilled at programming they have the urge to scratch their own itch, either writing tools to solve software development problems or …

To me, the most amazing thing is that he says that it is a problem that would take the average programmer a week back then, but today it could probably be coded in 5 minutes in AWK…

I think people aren't getting yet is that this generalizable beyond software. We can do this with LLM and anything that can be designed. https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/promp…

I'm wondering whether there is any reason why condensers can't be used for all program optimization. It seems like the definition would allow that: > The primary means for shifting…

I've always thought of this as being like proof by induction: start with the basis case.

If they can be generated from the source they probably shouldn't be in the source. Maybe it should be an IDE plugin that displays comments for code as you hover over it.