My own blog about programming and whatnot.
The adoption of LLMs in software development has led countless organizations to rapidly change their practices and structures. Old methods are questioned, replaced, and repurposed as the economics around creating new code get shaken up. Because humans and LLMs aren’t interchangeable, the dynamics in play are also very different. Systems are systems, and so regardless of what is changing, there are…
I keep noticing that the way AI SREs and coding agents are sold is fairly different: coding assistants are framed as augmenting engineers and are given names, and AI SREs are named “AI SRE” and generally marketed as a good way to make sure nobody is distracted by unproductive work. I don’t think giving names and anthropomorphizing components or agents is a good thing to do, but the picture that is…
A bit more than a month ago, I posted the following on social media: Seeing more reports and industry players blaming code reviews for slowing down the quick development done with AI. It's unclear whether anyone's asking if this is just moving the cognitive bottleneck of "understanding what's happening" around. "Add AI to the reviews" seems to be the end goal here. And I received multiple…
One of the really valuable things you can get out of in-depth incident investigations is a better understanding of how work is actually done , as opposed to how we think work is done, or how it is specified . A solid approach to do this is to get people back into what things felt like at the time, and interview them about their experience to know what they were looking for, what was challenging.…
In this post I’ll expose my current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they’re given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that is an incidental consequence of how badly the tools are designed. I’ll first cover some of the drive behind AI assistant adoption in software, the stochastic-looking divide in…