Musings And Mutterings By Jason Gorman
I m currently pulling together a bunch of sources that are mostly recent on the topic of LLMs and their use in software development. Some are peer-reviewed studies. Some are industry studies that haven t been peer-reviewed. One is statistical physics. Expect more from that angle. Wanna know the limits of a technology? Ask a Continue reading "AI Software Development What Does The Data Say?"
I see more and more converts to mutation testing, as folks learn that extending the horizon of agentic coding requires much, much stronger quality gates. Mutation testing deliberately injects errors into code to create mutant versions like turning a + into a -, or replacing a string with so we can see Continue reading "Do Your Quality Gates See The Brown M Ms In The Bowl?"
How many times in your career as a software developer have you been handed a requirement that turned out to be difficult and costly to fulfil? I ve been there many times, and I imagine you have, too. The hack I discovered a few years into my career is that one person s what is almost always Continue reading "The Power Of Why? "
Six teams are given a goal to guess a random 6-digit number. Each team gets feedback on their guesses at different stages. Team A gets feedback immediately after they guess a single digit. Team F gets feedback after guessing all 6 digits. The feedback is a simple Right or Wrong . We can visualise their Continue reading "Feedback Latency, Learning Productivity "
Thinking about the horizon of autonomous agentic workflows. I visualise them as sequences of decisions that are dependent. If decision D1 is correct, D2 is more likely to be correct. If D1 is wrong, then D2 is more likely to be wrong, too. Errors propagate and compound down the sequence. How many decisions can an Continue reading "Even If We Could Extend The Horizons of Autonomous Coding Agents,…
Big Design Up-Front making lots of design decisions before getting real-world feedback on any of them fails at any speed of decision-making. Indeed, the faster we make design decisions, the more we tend to fail. Most folks make a category error of approaching design as a shopping list of decisions. We decide A, Continue reading "The Solution To BDUF Isn t Faster BDUF"
I watched an interview recently with Claude Code creator Boris Cherny where he talked about how he doesn t prompt anymore, he just writes loops that do the prompting for him. Putting aside the quality of the end product that s producing, it s fascinating watching a whole generation of AI-assisted and agentic developers reinvent something that s been Continue reading "Return of the Revenge of the…
Since I m among friends, I hope I can be open with you. I started Codemanship 17 years ago in my late 30s, as a response to being asked by a recruiter for the gazillionth time Why are you still a software developer? I d been contracting for 12 years, and been programming professionally for 18, and Continue reading "A Car Crash In Slow Motion"
One handy thing about living in London, if you enjoy stand-up comedy, is that so many comedians test new material here in small venues often playing works in progress to audiences of just a few dozen. Stewart Lee famously iterates his show over many, many performances at the Leicester Square Theatre before he takes Continue reading "Feedback With A Face"
The impact of feedback loops like testing in software development can be as profound as it is widely misunderstood. Movie-making had a similar problem up until the 1960s. Crew shoots a take during the day. Director has to wait until the film s processed so they can watch the dailies to check for any mistakes nobody Continue reading "Faster Feedback - Better Outcomes"