Software, Hardware, Peopleware
The next frontier of LLMs is game development. And it’s off to an impressive start. If you spend some time on that-other-social-network-that-shall-not-be-named, you’ll see people posting games made of a single prompt to Opus 5 or GPT 5.6. The prompts are pretty much “make a game like X, don’t stop until it’s perfect”. I ran some quick experiments and got to…
Imagine for a second that you’re in charge of a spaceship. You have your mission (KR: visit & catalog 5 planets in the next 12 months). To get there, you need a suitable team of experts. And you need a ship that works. If you’ve never had the luck to get aboard an old patched-up Spaceship, this is what day-to-day looks like: Nothing to worry about, we already cataloged one planet and…
In a sense, the job of software engineer as a whole is shifting into a “developer tools” function - except the developers are no longer human. I dedicated a good chunk of the past 10 years to developer tools & platforms. The goal was always the same: making engineers more productive, primarily by two means: making better tools (such that the cognitive load and number of steps needed to perform…
Ever since we started developing software, UIs are largely a static part of the experience - painstakingly coded, field by field, by an army of designers and programmers. Many attempts have been made to make “fluid UIs” - tools like Notion are built on top of this idea, letting the user mix and match components (mostly tables and small embeds) - but what we have today is mostly…
AI is turning a problem we already had a few years ago - information overload - into an even larger problem. LLMs write long and wordy text. No matter how you claim you can tame this - the fluff is always there and it adds a ton of cognitive load on the readers. Gone are the days where readers wouldn’t be overwhelmed because the writers could only produce text as far as they could type.…
The basic laws of leadership that anyone managing anything (from a pet rabbit to a fortune 500 team) should know by heart are surprisingly simple: 1. If you don’t want to hear an opinion, don’t ask for it . Being uninterested on others’ opinions or ideas is a forgivable minor sin, people will assume you’re busy, not available, “in execution mode”, etc. Pretending to be interested just to shoot…
If you’re a developer and you’re still not using AI on your coding workflow (what year is this, 1985?), here’s three easy workflows that will demonstrably improve your day to day (and three I think you should avoid). First, things you should totally be doing (they make you more efficient and are actually fun too): ✅ Use LLMs to write tests Tests are the sweet spot of what current agentic tools can…
A common cognitive effect that people fail to consider when they vibe code apps is that you’re effectively outsourcing your thinking as you do it. Which means you’re not going to remember what got written where anywhere near as much as you would if you typed the code yourself. So you get frustrated, dismiss AI assistance altogether or pull yourself further into a big messy codebase, one order at a…
Vibe Coding experiment log, July 2025 The Socialmediaverse is full of people claiming that AI models “10x your productivity” and hordes of ancient engineers holding on to any evidence they can find to justify their views that “AI is completely useless”. It’s quite evident both are misguided takes - while there’s no magic bullet that 10xes productivity on…
On fragmented memories and lost time Ever since the Pandemic ended, I’ve been noticing how it’s becoming more and more difficult to meet up with people (be it online or in person). It feels like everyone is suddenly unavailable. Everyone I know is aksi constantly complaining about passing by faster and faster, but nobody seems to have much in the way of news or change or anything out…
There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. - Andrej Karpathy - Feb 2, 2025 As I spent 5 more hours chasing a bug at work today, I got to the sudden realization that, for more than a decade, I’ve been spending half my waking hours doing something that AIs are likely to…
It’s a very weird moment for hiring remotely in tech. The first hurdle is literally getting human CVs in front of you: any role you open on Linkedin gets immediately filled out with hundreds of applicants, most of which are recruiting agencies or weirdly empty profiles. The vast majority (including the supposedly human applicants) don’t even match the job description. Then comes the…
The “ big ball of mud ” is one of the most common antipatterns in software: A Big Ball of Mud is a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, spaghetti-code jungle. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth, and repeated, expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where…
classicprogrammerpaintings : “Resolving technical debt” Accumulated technical debt is visible in the middle image. Right image after refactoring. About 1930 Elías García Martínez, refactored by Cecilia Giménez Fresco Composition image CC-BY 2.0 by cea+ in Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/33255628@N00/7923536516 (collaboration Tero Kinnunen )
classicprogrammerpaintings : Hieronymus Bosch “A visual guide to the Scala language” oil on oak panels, 1490-1510 The left panel shows the functional features, the main one describes the type system, and the right the object oriented parts
Dear recruiter who just spammed me (the email says {FirstName}, but I assume it’s directed to me) about a position of PHP hands-on CTO on the fastest growing startup of all times, I know you must be very busy with individual communications with the small handful of experienced PHP hands-on CTOs in our competitive little industry, so I’ll save your time with a short cover letter before we jump on…
Google recently published a mind-blowing paper exploring what neural networks interpret when processing an image. The results are a dreamscape of hallucinations and patterns that pretty much answers the question on whether Androids dream on electric sheep. My quick contribution: easy #deepdreams You can feed the network and see the results over your own images using the IPython Notebook Google…
Maslow's pyramid of code review : As in Maslow’s pyramid, each layer requires the previous one. It is useless for code that is charging the wrong customer to be readable.Code should be: • Correct: does the code do what it’s supposed…
owlturdcomix : We go forward. image twitter | facebook
moviecode : In the film Elysium the space station is rebooted using code taken directly from the Intel Architecture Software Developer’s Manual Volume 3: System Development [ pdf ].