My personal space on the internet
I was recently fixing up the feeds on my website and wanted to make sure a) that they render probably and b) that the filtered ones contain the correct entries, so I built this little tool to preview atom or rss feeds. tool / tools.kirahowe.com ( source ) / #atom #blogging #rss #static-websites #tools #web-development
This is the best “AI usage” policy I’ve seen yet. I would love it if projects I worked on would adopt similar conventions and standards. you as an author need to take the time to make sure that all of the ideas in the writing are the ideas that you personally intend to convey (including the structure and wording that determines which ideas are emphasized) and that the documents are a good use of…
This was a pretty scathing indictment of the tech industry but I think on point. It says a lot of things that you’re not supposed to say out loud right now but that everyone is thinking. Like: AI makes projects with weak engineering culture fail much faster. and In every team, there are competent people who make the project possible. There are also people who essentially make it harder for…
I apparently can’t hold a conversation with a friend, post on social media, or even daydream idly without the topic eventually turning to bloody A.I. It’s not always me who brings it up, but it often is; I’ve rarely known such a “sticky” subject. This resonates. Unlike Oliver Burkeman I do use AI more or less all day every day at work. But I also find myself talking about it so much more than I…
I was excited to see that this is the first module in a new Coursera course I'm doing. I've long thought that ethics are missing from software development , and I think it's more important than ever to care about the consequences of what we're doing and building in this age of AI. This course on building agents literally opens with this statement: This module is for…
Well this is awkward. Literally yesterday I wrote “the hard part of software engineering was never writing the code.” I concede that that way of describing what’s happening to the software industry is a bit lazy and exaggerated. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is clear many aspects of work and life will be transformed—including programming. This definitely feels…
Maybe I’m just too cynical but it’s really starting to feel like more or less all of this new “AI”/agent software is vapourware. I’ve been trying to take this whole “agentic development” thing seriously and there is just so much friction in this ecosystem it’s absolutely insane. It’s very clear that all this stuff is built by engineers who a) have free access to unlimited tokens and b) have no…
I finally got around to getting my website back up and running. Years ago now I started the process of re-building my website (yet again), this time as a link blog . I finally finished getting the machinery working and old content ported over, then of course had to bikeshed the UI for a few days. Anyway one thing I wanted was different colours for the different types of entries. But eyeballing…
It feels like the big LLMs have come full circle. At first they were too naive to implement meaningful features autonomously and took so much handholding to get anything done it was quite a pain babysitting them. Then they got good enough to do meaningful software engineering work and there was (I now recognize in hindsight) a sweet spot at some point early this year where they got meaningfully…
I’d never heard about this conference before, the talks look super interesting. I wish more people in the industry cared about working software. The bar seems to only be getting lower in this age of AI. I always love finding a batch of new people to follow and new conferences to daydream about attending. link / softwareshould.work ( via ) / #conferences #quality #software-engineering
This is a great write up about how Airbnb ships AI features that actually work. Basically, the answer is they test them. What a concept! It sounds really dumb and obvious when you say it out loud, but it’s been surprising to me how many teams are shipping LLM-based systems to production with no test harnesses or evals at all. Expect to spend a meaningful share of your total project effort on…
I've been hearing more and more things about jujutsu and want to try it out. It is so hard to learn new things that replace something I've been using almost every day for over 10 years though. The muscle memory is so ingrained and my mental model of what version control even is is so rigid, it's hard to wrap my head around the idea that it could be anything other than git's. My…
The thing I hate most about AI is that it has made it very difficult to actually learn something new anymore. I have become convinced that if you already know what you are doing, AI can be quite cool. It definitely allows me to develop more and better software than ever before (which I'm not convinced yet is necessarily a good thing, but it is cool). The problem is, though, if you don't…
To understand what a swarm of tens of thousands of automated actions did… This is a really interesting preview into the scale and type of attacks that are bound to become more common in this age of ai. Thanks to this approach, we were able to do in hours what would usually take days, and match the adversary's speed. Useful perspective, if you’re not already using AI to secure production,…
One of the main ways I work with AI since I had a baby 5 months ago is prompting genies from my phone while I'm naptrapped or breastfeeding (did you know newborns feed for ~5 hours per day?! I did not). It’s very sweet and cozy napping with a baby but eventually also boring. Anyway it’s very cumbersome to review code when building things this way, but I decided that’s mostly fine since for a…
The problem is that intelligence and trustworthiness are different properties of a model. We measure the first obsessively and the second barely at all, and this week produced a pile of evidence that they can move in opposite directions at the same time. — Laurie Voss ( via ) quote / #ai #ai-hype #ai-safety #llms #model-evaluation #software-engineering #trust
This was a great read. I also believe this to be true and am equally concerned about the consequences. The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. This is interesting and unsurprising, it seems like it’s just human nature to fall in line, regardless of how absurd the groupthink is. I’ve definitely seen it in every…
The intersection of AI tooling and open source projects is interesting to me. I’ve also come around to the reality that LLM-powered coding agents like Claude code or codex are pretty clearly game changing when it comes to how software gets produced. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but…
I really love seeing more and more serious engineering being put into making LLMs actually work in production. They’re too cool a tool not to use or integrate into consumed software, but nobody actually wants more shitty chat bots. Making them work reliably to actually make software better requires structure and effort, and this is one cool way of thinking about it I hadn’t come across before.…
Without additional artifacts beyond what human-driven CD requires, agent-generated code accumulates drift and technical debt faster than teams can detect it. This is undeniably true at this point and it’s cool to see frameworks and systems emerging for addressing it. This is the first time I’d heard of “agentic CD” and it’s super interesting! link / beyond.minimumcd.org ( via ) / #ai-agents…