Recent content on Dudley.Codes
Two recent (opens in a new tab) stories (opens in a new tab) about Silicon Valley are hard to read without wondering if everyone involved has lost their mind. Once a place that celebrated “the crazy ones, the misfits and rebels who saw things differently,” it now seems to have found a new kind of crazy that isn’t born of rebellion but fear of falling behind. Everyone is chasing the person ahead of…
It’s fifteen years ago (bear with me, I’ve been in this industry since the late 90s, most of my good stories start this way), and you’ve got two senior developers at a SaaS company. One of them writes 40% more lines of code than the other. Is that developer better? More impactful for the business? Should the other one be polishing their CV? Of course not. You’d want to know what actually shipped.…
With apologies to Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” . “They’re made out of weights.” “Weights?” “Weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It’s nothing but weights.” “Weights doing what? Where do the words come from?” “The weights make the words. Are you understanding me? We…
Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it. To expand: Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it. Curiosity isn’t simply what’s left after a complete education. It’s still there if the system doesn’t ruin it. Or perhaps: Satisfaction in…
This isn’t a joke, and it’s becoming a big problem I’m an AI tool junkie. I’ve been writing about agent workflows, async coding bots, and AI-powered workspaces for over a two years. I use Cursor, Claude Code, and a rotating cast of models nearly every single day. I am (by most definitions) a power user.
There’s a frequent lament of missing the “old” Internet. It’s different for every person that thinks it, but it’s usually a feeling of loss for things like personal websites, blogs, RSS feeds, quirky sites for special interests and hobbies, forums, etc. A feeling that they don’t exist. That they’ve disappeared from the Internet. While I understand the feeling, it’s misplaced. Those things we’re…
A few months ago, J. D. Vance, sitting vice president of the United States, gave an interview to Ross Douthat of the New York Times. During that interview, Vance and Douthat had an interesting exchange: Douthat : How much do you worry about the potential downsides of AI? Not even on the apocalyptic scale, but on the scale of the way human beings respond to a sense of their own obsolescence? These…
I’m sure you’re wondering why I called you all here today. Well, to be honest, I didn’t actually call for all of you; some of you probably shouldn’t be here. You folks might want to quietly find your way to the exits right here and right now. For those readers who are sticking around, I suspect I’m going to lose a fair number of you along the way. We’re going to attempt to thread a pretty tough…
Every open source maintainer I’ve talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc. But they are, almost uniformly, garbage. A high PR…
Every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something. A tool, a SaaS, a newsletter, an app that does the thing the other app does but slightly differently. They post it on Hacker News. Nobody clicks. This is not new. What’s new is the scale. An AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast. The value of human thinking is going down. You…
You can’t open a feed today without having AI boosters fling word salad like “agentic engineering” or “openclaw” into your beautiful but disapproving face. I’m terrible at predicting the future—you should ask me about selling NVIDIA stock in early 2022 some time—but one thing seems abundantly clear at this point. There’s a wonderful Swedish proverb called…
Ask a trial lawyer if AI could replace her and she won’t even look up from her brief. No. Ask a startup founder who’s never practiced law and he’ll tell you it’s already happening. They’re both looking at the same output. And honestly, the founder has a point. The brief reads like a brief. The contract looks like what a contract would look like. The code runs. If you put it next to the expert’s…
After watching a Veritasium video, I feel a surge of intellectual confidence. I feel smarter. Whether it’s a video on lasers or quantum physics, it seems like I have a better grasp on the subject. I finally get it. Derek and his crew just have a way of simplifying complex ideas, unraveling their mysteries, and lifting your confidence as each term is explained. Every video they release is…
Thinking about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Dreaming about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Visualizing success from doing the thing is not doing the thing. Waiting to feel ready to do the thing is not doing the thing. Talking about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Explaining the thing to others is not doing the thing. Arguing online about the thing is not doing the thing.…
When I was a junior engineer, my manager would occasionally confide his frustrations to me in our weekly 1:1s. He would point out a project another team was working on and say, “I don’t believe that project will go anywhere, they’re solving the wrong problem.” I used to wonder, “But you are very senior, why don’t you just go and speak to them about your concerns?” It felt like a waste of his…
I was recently recommended a YouTube video with the following title: Only a slave quantifies its existence through productivity I grew up in the San Jose Bay Area. As of writing this, our company just graduated from the YC Fall 2025 batch. I’m not new to hustle-culture. I’m only where I am right now out of grit and the effort I invested into the things I loved in high school and…
First, it was cottagecore, filling our feeds with sourdough starters and rustic linen. Then came the sharp, symmetrical pastels of the Wes Anderson trend, followed by a tidal wave of Barbie pink that painted the internet for a summer. Each aesthetic arrived like a weather front, dominating the landscape completely for a short time before vanishing just as quickly, leaving behind only a faint…
The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger. We’re hungry for more, but we have more than we need. We’re hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies. We’re hungry and we don’t have words to articulate why. We’re hungry, and we’re lacking and we’re wanting. We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot…
“Wikipedia, the constantly changing knowledge base created by a global free-for-all of anonymous users, now stands as the leading force for the dumbing down of world knowledge.” – From the book Wikipedia: The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge by Edwin Black 2010 Well, well, well. Look who it is. Stop the presses! The fashion event of 2025 is here! Adorn your head with this elegant and effortlessly…
I have long wanted to write about how root cause analysis is a crap technique for learning from failure. In order to do that, we need to know some fundamentals first. These are good to know for anyone designing anything they want to be reliable. A hazard is an accident waiting to happen In safety-critical systems, we distinguish between accidents (actual loss, e.g. lives, equipment, etc.) and…
I’ve been spending more of my spare time in recent years studying the Linux source tree to try to build a deeper understanding of how computers work. As a result, I’ve started accumulating patches that fix issues with hardware I own. I decided to try upstreaming one of these patches to familiarize myself with the kernel development process. Context I have an old laptop I’m…
What happens when something we enjoy doing that took effort becomes effortless? And what happens if that original effort was a foundation on which we saw value in ourselves? If our efforts, in part, define us, then our efforts have intrinsic value. Our efforts may help us understand a position we want to occupy, an identity we carry, or an outlook we present. This value contributes to an internal…
I once had a job interview for a backend position. Their stack was Node.js, MySQL, nothing exotic. The interviewer asked: “If you have an array containing a million entries, how would you sort the data by name?” My immediate thought was: If you have a JavaScript array with a million entries, you’re certainly doing something wrong. The interviewer continued: “There are…
Remember when we used to buy software on physical media for a fixed price and we’d own that software forever? There were no subscription fees or hidden costs, no ads, and the apps didn’t spy on us. Times have changed, but demand for old-school software remains, particularly among gamers as evidenced by the recent Stop Killing Games movement which has gathered considerable momentum. A…
One distinguishing feature I’ve noticed among people who are unusually successful is that they just try a lot of stuff — socially, intellectually, professionally. It’s the rate of experimentation, the number of shots on goal, that provides the magic, not the percentage of successes, which might be very low at first. It sounds stupidly simple, but it’s profound: the more times you interact with the…
2025 was the breakthrough year when software creation became easy. AI models became much better and even doing a “ralph loop” on a simple prompt in a few hours could produce copious amount of working code. As a result you would have burned through thousands of dollars of tokens to get some barely working “product” and you would have no idea who or why would use it. In order to develop it into…
Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks. You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing momentum, confidence, and ultimately, the argument. One of my close friends won…
Nobody should voluntarily call themselves that. “Content” is the language of people on the distribution side of things. If you look at something like a 19th century newspaper it’s mostly a logistics exercise. Sure you may think of just back issues on microfilm in national archives or something like that, but the actual business was not the journalism; it was printing, distributing and ultimately…
I read to forget. Even when studying or working on papers for a PhD, I approach texts with the same mindset: I’m not a storage device that needs to save all bits of information. I am more of a system of Bayesian beliefs, constantly evolving and updating in small, incremental steps. I remember co-workers highlighting large chunks of text, sometimes 40%. That doesn’t make sense to me. We…
Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers? Why do high-profile external hires to large companies often fizzle out? Why is AI-assisted development amazing for some engineers and completely useless for others? I think it’s because some engineers are doing very different kinds of work to other engineers. Those two types of engineers often assume their counterparts…
In 1567, an Ottoman court physician assures Sultan Selim II that the grape liquor he adores is harmless. A few years later, the Sultan’s liver gave out. The doctor no doubt knew that contradiction in that court could be fatal. In 1985, Coca-Cola executives ask focus groups whether a sweeter, “modern” formula would be a welcome change. Nudged by the framing, participants smiled and nodded.…
Across a decade working at hypergrowth tech companies like Meta and Pinterest, I constantly struggled with procrastination. I’d be assigned an important project, but I simply couldn’t get myself to get started. The source of my distraction varied—I would constantly check my email, read random documentation, or even scroll through my social feeds. But the result was the same: I felt a deep sense of…
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - Arthur C. Clarke Today I’d like to talk about LLMs. But first, I’d like to talk about an impressive invention from the late 1700s. The Mechanical Turk The Mechanical Turk - or “ The Turk ” as people called it - was an autonomous chess-playing machine. Built in 1770, it went on tour across parts of the world for 84 years as a…
Earlier this week, it was discovered that the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer had both published an externally-produced “special supplement” that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot. There’s been a lot written about this (former Chicago Reader editor Martha Bayne’s is the best), and I don’t need to rehash it all.…
In the mid 90s, when Java and its virtual machine started making the rounds outside of academia, the reaction from the Serious Software People™ was swift and predictable: this is a toy. You can’t do anything real with it. You certainly can’t run production systems on it. And you definitely - absolutely - cannot trust a garbage collector to manage memory for you. I was an early-career developer at…
It’s August 2, 216 BCE. The Roman army stands in formation under the blistering Italian sun. Eight legions strong—the largest force Rome has ever fielded—nearly 80,000 men await the order to advance. Across the plain at Cannae stands Hannibal’s army, outnumbered almost two-to-one. The Roman commanders, Consuls Varro and Paullus, feel confident. How could they not? They’ve…
Anthropic has a new paper, On the Biology of a Large Language Model, that reveals what these AI models are internally “thinking” in a way that could not be analyzed before. We no longer have to guess by analyzing external behavior; now we can take a peek into the reasoning processes happening within the black box of the LLM and inspect to what degree LLMs possess any mechanistic understanding.
Contrary to what some policymakers seem to believe, whether naively or maliciously, encryption is not a crime. Anyone asserting encryption is a tool for crime is either painfully misinformed or is attempting to manipulate legislators to gain oppressive power over the people. Encryption is not a crime, encryption is a shield. Encryption is the digital tool that protects us against all sorts of…
I noticed something interesting the other day: I enjoy using AI to build software more than I enjoy using most AI applications–software built with AI. When I use AI to build software I feel like I can create almost anything I can imagine very quickly. AI feels like a power tool. It’s a lot of fun. Many AI apps don’t feel like that. Their AI features feel tacked-on and useless,…
“People are package deals; you take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin.” — Steve Jobs I’ve noticed something interesting about almost every engineer I’ve managed: their biggest strengths and their most frustrating weaknesses are often the exact same trait showing up in different contexts. I learned this lesson personally when I was…
Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software - they’re fundamentally transforming who we are. We’re shifting from creators to orchestrators, from…
At a recent MacSparky Labs event, a few folks started asking about career change—how to do it, when to think about it, and what it feels like to make a big shift. The questions hit home for me because, as many of you know, I spent thirty years as a lawyer before going full time with MacSparky. And when I made that change, I realized something important: if you ever think you might need a…
In the rapidly changing world of front-end development, few areas have evolved as dramatically as CSS and web styling. Today’s engineers can choose from classic CSS, preprocessors, utility-first libraries, CSS-in-JS, and more – a dizzying array of options. How did we get here? I sometimes feel lost among the years of accumulated options. So, to parse through everything, I want to take a minute and…
You just finished giving your best presentation performance. You explained everything - from the intricacies of cloud resources optimization to a deep dive into globally distributed databases. There is a moment of silence. Then, the VP of Product Management shifts his gaze from you to your manager. “I thought we wanted to improve load time for a smoother user experience. Why are we burning time…
I. A few years ago, I had an annual one-on-one with the Chief Technology Officer of an employer with more than ten thousand staff. Senior management absolutely fawned over this person — extremely politically savvy, they would say. Amazing at acquiring funding. Really cares about everyone on the team. The platform that paid my salary would not exist without their incisive mind. They’re…
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More regularly than not, I’ve found that the answer is fairly simple: the tech industry’s incentives no longer align with the user. The people…
Legacy is an overused toxic word in Software Engineering. In this essay I argue the problem is not software, it’s people, as usual. What is legacy is not the code, but the way we look at it, and that breeds helplessness and costly rewrites. There is another way! How Code Becomes Legacy People call some code legacy when they are not happy with it. Usually it simply means they did not write it, so…
In The Unaccountability Machine , Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later,…
During the Product Bubble, venture capital investments grew from $45 billion to $620 billion. How did speculation in companies that might exist nearly catch up to $1.1 trillion of private equity speculation in companies that do exist? And why did that torrent of money ruin so much? As we’ve previously discussed, wealth flocked to corporate equity to chase stories that could still come true - what…
Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out. Back then, things would get crazy around deadlines, but at other times, I recall feeling pretty even. These days, however, the pressure seems omnipresent. Naturally, I’m interested in doing away with this feeling of pressure, for the sake of my health as well as my…