121–130 of 234 posts
> This gap between output velocity and comprehension velocity is cognitive debt.
I have felt that lack of absorption during the last months, adding doomscroolling to the equation, I have felt how my thinking is disappearing.
I tried to speculatively expand that idea in this post
The article very much resonates with my experience past several months. The project I work on has been steadily growing for years, but the amount of engineers taking care of it stayed same or even declined a bit. Most of features are isolated and left untouched for months unless something comes up. So far, I managed growing scope by relying on tests more and more. Then I switched to exclusively developing against a s…
BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content
Richard Gabriel wrote a famous essay Worse Is Better ( https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html ). The MIT approach vs the New Jersey approach does not necessarily apply to the discussion of the merits of coding agent, but the essay's philosophy seems relevant. AI coding sometimes sacrifices correctness or cleanness for simplicity, but it will win and win big as long as the produced code works per its users' sta…
I think we might as well just go all in at this point: "LGTM, LLM". The industry always overshoots and then self-corrects later. Therefore, maybe the right thing to do is help it get to a more sane equilibrium is to forget about the code altogether and focus on other ways to constrain it / ensure correctness and/or determine better ways to know when comprehension is needed vs optional. What I don't like is the imposs…
I think we might as well just go all in at this point: "LGTM, LLM". The industry always overshoots and then self-corrects later. Therefore, maybe the right thing to do is help it get to a more sane equilibrium is to forget about the code altogether and focus on other ways to constrain it / ensure correctness and/or determine better ways to know when comprehension is needed vs optional. What I don't like is the imposs…
While I too am only seeing a boost on the order of 20% so far, I think there are more creative applications of LLM beyond writing code, that can unlock multiples of net productivity in delivering product end to end. People are discovering these today and blogging about them, but the noise about dark factories and agents supervising agents supervising agents, etc, is drowning out their voices. Every one of us is a pio…
The whole premise of the post, that coders remember what and why they wrote things from 6 months ago, is flawed. We've always had the problem that understanding while writing code is easier than understanding code you've written. This is why, in the pre-AI era, Joel Spolsky wrote: "It's harder to read code than to write it."
I don't remember exactly what I wrote and how the logic works, but I generally remember the broad flow of how things tie together, which makes it easier to drop in on some aspect and understand where it is code-wise.
The worst code bases I have to deal with have either no philosophy or a dozen competing and incompatible philosophies.
The best are (obviously) written in my battle tested and ultra refined philosophy developed over the last ~25 years.
But I'm perfectly happy to be working in code bases written even with philosophies that I violently disagree with. Just as long as the singular (or at least compatible) philosophy has a certain maturity and consistency to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that recording dialog with the agent (prompt, the agent's plan, and agent's report after implementation) will become increasingly important in the future.
I have this at the bottom of my AGENTS.md: You will also add a markdown file to the changelog directory named with the current date and time `date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H-%M-%SZ"`, record the prompt, and a brief summary of what changes you made, this should be the same summary you gave the developer in the chat. From that I get the prompt and the summary for each change. It's not perfect but it at least adds some context ar…