As a teacher I know for a fact some people just learn faster than others. So I think part of why developers get attached to tools is because learning takes time. Some people can pick up new tools in a day. I can't. I feel like new tools are created faster than I can learn them.
Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
51–60 of 148 posts
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes that is what happened to SO. They now get practically zero questions, zero answers, zero page views, and zero ad revenue. It is their own fault because they froze everyone out of the site and then once LLMs became an alternative, everyone started asking their questions to LLMs. They are now trying to somehow pivot to AI to make revenue again, starting with Stack Overflow for Agents, and now with wordy vacuous blo…
The pains for me were around all the penalties I got for not following formalities, or at least that's what it felt like to me.
Nobody liked SO. They tolerated it as long as it was the best way to get answers to questions.
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#53This article is a bit rambly so I'll just focus on some things from the beginning: >If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in. This concept was betrayed far before agentic tools, with a much earlier concept: Automatic updates. To use one product as an example: When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even…
> When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP
This timeline doesn't seem to make sense, as Windows XP came out in 2001, and Windows Vista in 2006-2007. Maybe you are referring to Service Pack 3 in 2008?
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#54When I see “stack overflow blog” the brand encodes distrust. I remember when they removed links to meta and replaced them with the corporate blog with low quality PR and political agitation.
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#55There's this great blog post by Joel Spolsky from 2000 [1], where he essentially argues that controlling your environment makes you happy. He writes about his summer job in a bakery and how the dough mixers would be so unpredictable and how frustrating that was. I think AI agents are quite similar to a lot of folks, they change significantly with each major model update and even every day as the vendor tweaks the sys…
> and even every day as the vendor tweaks the system prompts I just patched Claude Code's system prompts, pinned the version and stopped upgrading without first dissecting and auditing the executable. Even discovered Anthropic can remotely inject strings into the system prompt via some "growth book" or something. Neutralized that too. Things got a lot better after I started doing this. It straight up fixed Opus 4.6,…
Maybe you should try using Pi [0] if you care a lot about owning your harness and making sure you're in control of what goes into your system prompt and context?
[0]: https://pi.dev
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#56I feel like these abstractions like "CI might not work well in the era of agentic tooling" are fine for thought-leadership posts but there's so much hands-on work to be done. The last word on AI computer use shouldn't be bash utils that were already feature-complete before MJ recorded Thriller. There is some movement in this direction--there is a new 'gh' subcommand called repo read-file for example, that lets agents…
Hand-crafted, domain-specific tools massively outperform general purpose ones. Shell execution and raw DOM access are great for a backstop, but you can go so much further with just a little bit of translation and delegation around the environment. I think browser automation is probably the most apt scenario. Often a human who understands how a page is meant to be perceived can transform a megabyte of raw web content…
Yes exactly. It's almost like there's this expectation that if the LLM GPU-Maxxes enough it can do anything but like... why. There's no reason to wade through a million HTML tags if you can slice out the exact div you want to check
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#57There's this great blog post by Joel Spolsky from 2000 [1], where he essentially argues that controlling your environment makes you happy. He writes about his summer job in a bakery and how the dough mixers would be so unpredictable and how frustrating that was. I think AI agents are quite similar to a lot of folks, they change significantly with each major model update and even every day as the vendor tweaks the sys…
> and even every day as the vendor tweaks the system prompts I just patched Claude Code's system prompts, pinned the version and stopped upgrading without first dissecting and auditing the executable. Even discovered Anthropic can remotely inject strings into the system prompt via some "growth book" or something. Neutralized that too. Things got a lot better after I started doing this. It straight up fixed Opus 4.6,…
Crazy amount of effort when you can just use a different harness and a better and cheaper model.
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#58This article is a bit rambly so I'll just focus on some things from the beginning: >If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in. This concept was betrayed far before agentic tools, with a much earlier concept: Automatic updates. To use one product as an example: When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even…
> When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP This timeline doesn't seem to make sense, as Windows XP came out in 2001, and Windows Vista in 2006-2007. Maybe you are referring to Service Pack 3 in 2008?
Indeed it makes no sense at all, because Windows 2000 even came out before Windows ME.
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#59This article is a bit rambly so I'll just focus on some things from the beginning: >If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in. This concept was betrayed far before agentic tools, with a much earlier concept: Automatic updates. To use one product as an example: When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even…
This is part of why my text editor is built from source on my own branch where I only occasionally pull in changes from master. I know I'm probably a very rare exception here.
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#60There is a great article called "Manual Work is a Bug: Always be Automating" [0] that was written in the pre LLM era for technical operations teams. I would argue that it is just as relevant today as it was then.
To summarize:
- start making a list of the manual tasks you do
- if those tasks involve running command line tools, add an item with the commands you run
- if they are manual tasks, add those too
- over time, keep automating one portion of the list at a time e.g. the commands can become a script, the manual tasks can become tickets to another team to automate etc
At the end of the above process you have a series of automated steps that become a system instead of a bunch of items in someone's head.
In my mind, the only thing that changed with LLMs is that it's faster to create the scripts and some of the manual tasks can be done by the LLM until you get a script to do that too.
We invented code to help do "mechanical" tasks over and over again in the same way. Why replace that with agentic systems??
P.S. This is also why the whole "just commit the prompt, bro" is such utter hogwash