Viewing profile — pmg101

Yeah it tells you nothing of value. It's the Recency Bias taken to its ultimate conclusion isn't it. Anything I learned about AI I learned in the last few months but somehow that's…

Somebody at $formerwork wrote a "skill" that takes a poorly/briefly specified Jira ticket, and "fleshes it out", purportedly so that when an agent picks up the ticket it has more c…

I agree. My guess is the author either 1. Deliberately used LLM tics in their prose, for artistic and provocative reasons, or 2. Used AI It's quite interesting to reflect on.

Today is August 4, 2026

I'm REALLY REALLY not enjoying this current middle ground where we may be on the cusp of LLMs writing all code better than I could OR we may be on the cusp of realising that this i…

Meanwhile, here in the UK we had the bus with no door at all that you could just jump on and off from in moving traffic. People trusted to manage their own risk. I remember this vi…

Thanks. I do think I see the distinction you're making.

Can you give an example of a pattern that was considered common practice in a book 10 to 15 years ago that would be considered low-quality code today? My experience is pretty much …

Isn't "spaghetti code" a casual term to describe "complex and disjointed codebase"? What's the difference? Have I been using the term wrong all this time?

Whether or not it's a transitional phase, it seems reasonable to want and to build better tools for where we are now rather than where we may be in some unspecified future , wouldn…

The longer I spend in my career the more obvious this is to me. Unfortunately younger colleagues don't always have the maturity to have also realised this, which can be a problem i…

(Just to note that although the article is on martinfowler.com Martin is not the author. It's attributed to Thoughtworks CTO Giles Edwards-Alexander.)

It's very interesting to have some data on this. It matches my experience which is that LLMs greatly benefit from well factored code, but are not particularly adept at creating suc…

It's the "it's not X. It's Y" pattern isn't it? Although the verb "stayed with me" seems a little sloppy to me too.

And didn't the NHS app use Bluetooth proximity to alert you if you'd been in contact with a COVID case early in the pandemic? A nice case of life imitating art.

Yes, I've found it to be completely incompatible with managers and the corporate world. I had some success in small startups where I was left to my own devices and built cool stuff…

> AI-generated code has about 1.7 times as many major issues as code written by humans That's a very specific number I'd love to know the source of (and investigate further.)

The smartphone free childhood movement is explicitly saying children shouldn't have phones (until 14). I'm broadly with them although with nuance.

This style of prose sets my teeth on edge and practically gives me PTSD I see so much of it. I prefer code but I get paid to read this shit instead now. I want to say "ok, and now …

A massive amount of human natural intelligence goes into war, economic competition and gaining dominance over others though?

I just don't see that borne out in the real world though. My mother worked in an office in London as a shorthand typist in the 60s, along with thousands of other young women. At so…

If you wanna travel faster you can build muscle, or you can just get in a car.

I've also wondered about it. I think the answer is, "you don't really need 10,000 engineers". You can do a lot with small teams of engineers. This was true before AI. Macintosh was…

Isn't that basically a one sentence description of the feudal system that operated for five centuries in Europe?