Software. Startups. Outer Space.
12 minutes to read There’s been lots of rancor online about whether you should read and review LLM-authored code. I wanted to share a project we’ve been using in production for months where I rarely review any of it: ShellSyntaxTree . ShellSyntaxTree is a parser that attempts to create AST representations of both bash and PowerShell commands using a shared tree representation and parser…
9 minutes to read I experienced a type of AI psychosis, but not the one everyone else is talking about - in my case it was a need to “keep my agents busy” at all times or I was “falling behind” relative to everyone else using large language models to move “faster” in the software industry. I’ve recently concluded that this fear is nonsense and, like most other things you read online, is…
26 minutes to read In “ Software 2.0: Code is Cheap, Good Taste is Not ” I introduced “Software 2.0,” broadly, as an emerging practice in software development where large language models implement and humans act as planners, designers, and verifiers of LLM output. We’ll continue to get more into the specific techniques, tools, and practices of how to do that throughout these essays. In this post,…
42 minutes to read I’ve been using LLMs to help me develop software in earnest since the original releases of GitHub CoPilot. The earliest talk I gave on the subject was in March / April 2024 to a customer who was interested in rolling out LLM-assisted coding to their staff. I made a public-facing version of this talk in July, 2024 . All of those techniques are still fundamentally useful, but the…
7 minutes to read “I have a great idea: let’s create a five-layer deep inheritance hierarchy with a universal base class that every domain object inherits from! That way, when requirements inevitably change, we’ll only need to touch… everything.” This is episode two of my Why Your Software Sucks video series, and today we’re talking about inheritance - specifically, how deep inheritance…
16 minutes to read I had never heard of Michael Green before his now-infamous essay “ Part 1: My Life Is a Lie - How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America ” went extremely viral on X. Go read it. The short version: real poverty is closer to $140,000 than $31,000. “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” and The…
10 minutes to read I’ve done a ton of consulting as part of my work at Petabridge over the past 10 years and I run into developer onboarding problems constantly with new clients. It takes much longer than it should to clone a customer’s application from source control and successfully run it. Continuous deployment and continuous integration (CI/CD) get a ton of attention in the DevOps space, but…
20 minutes to read We were getting ready to redesign and simplify phobos.petabridge.com - our Akka.NET observability platform documentation site. The plan was to remove a bunch of old pages, restructure the information architecture, and redirect everything properly so we wouldn’t break any inbound links from Google, Stack Overflow, or the blog posts referencing our documentation. The problem: how…
11 minutes to read Everyone in tech is convinced that AI will eliminate junior developers first. “Why hire a junior when AI can write code?” they ask. The prevailing wisdom is that entry-level developers are most vulnerable to automation. They’re dead wrong. I wrote “ The Future of AI Belongs to Experienced Operators with Good Taste ” a few months back and that’s still absolutely true. But there’s…
8 minutes to read “Software supply chain management” is one of those terms that sounds like Venture Capital-funded vendor marketing bullshit right up until it isn’t. In 2016 the npm left-pad incident taught many of us in the software industry the importance of: The fragility of depending directly on central package management systems, such as npm or nuget.org , hence why artifact proxying tools…