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Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
141–148 of 148 posts
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#142I 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…
I've found the process of building good reliable CI that thoroughly covers everything has been greatly improved by LLMs. There's so much tedious plumbing and grunt work involved in building CI and automated testing infrastructure for bespoke products that they can handle just fine while you concentrate on the important bits - I would say it's an area where agentic workflows are even more suited than regular product c…
100% coverage and useful tests aren't the same thing. Why are we still not aware of this?
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#143This 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…
Windows Vista was disliked at launch primarily it ran slowly on existing hardware, suffered from widespread driver incompatibilities, and introduced constant security pop-ups.
UI changes were pretty minor, especially compared to the flat design of windows 8.
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#144Tools encode determinism, not trust
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big driver of automatic updates in the late 00s and early 10s were people who never updated their OS or browser and were getting compromised left and right. As I recall, one of the earliest widespread users automatic updates was Google with Chrome, which they did because otherwise there was no way to respond to severe 0days and such before huge swathes of users got hit. So I think there's a place for automatic upda…
> A big driver of automatic updates in the late 00s and early 10s were people who never updated their OS or browser and were getting compromised left and right. I think we would be better off if people worked harder to prevent vulnerabilities before releasing the software.
> I think we would be better off if people worked harder to prevent vulnerabilities before releasing the software.
Pawn Stars meme: "Best I can do is people using glorified chatbots to generate mediocre code an order of magnitude faster"
That said, the vast majority of the exploits that led to the widespread adoption of automatic update mechanisms were based around memory safety bugs which we do in fact have solutions to entirely prevent in most newly developed software these days.
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found the process of building good reliable CI that thoroughly covers everything has been greatly improved by LLMs. There's so much tedious plumbing and grunt work involved in building CI and automated testing infrastructure for bespoke products that they can handle just fine while you concentrate on the important bits - I would say it's an area where agentic workflows are even more suited than regular product c…
100% coverage and useful tests aren't the same thing. Why are we still not aware of this?
I'm speaking in the context of building scaffolding for e2e testing, not the tests themselves.
When I say "everything" I mean the frontend, backend, database, seeded data, optimizing runtime etc, I'm not talking about loc coverage. I would not recommend using llms to generate the tests themselves without heavy guidance and review, and you're right that 100% coverage is often a counterproductive goal if the code under test is anything less than pure business logic.
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#147Im typing this in GVim thanks to Tridactyl using my new mechanical keyboard running a ZMK firmware I just built via Github actions (or directly via ZMK Studio). This is ridiculously complex to just type a few paragraphs. Nobody in their right mind would invest this amount of yak shaving... and yet I do so because I bet, rather confidently, that in few years, heck few decades, all those tools will be different (or may…
> typing this in GVim thanks to Tridactyl Thanks for the heads-up that such a thing is possible. I will definitely be investigating it.
Check out firenvim too
Re: Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> typing this in GVim thanks to Tridactyl Thanks for the heads-up that such a thing is possible. I will definitely be investigating it.
Check out firenvim too
nice, --does it work on Firefox Nightly on Android too by any chance?-- guess not, seems limited to text edition, not browsing