The continuing story of an old software developer and his ongoing quest for assistance from books, the web, IDEs, pair programmers, and now… AI agents. - Medium
The tyranny of the cloud is hard to overcome. Despite the blatantly political headline which will instantly be subsumed into the legion of other sloppy articles still being indexed (for now) by search engines: Today’s article will actually take a more technical turn, and I’m going to be reporting my experiences playing with local LLMs (running on consumer-grade PC hardware I own) for agentic…
Developing software, hiring, education, voting…it affects everything. Fake it when you make it, then fail to ever make anything worthwhile ever again. The world is “judgy”. Some of this is warranted: You want to hire and promote the best people. You need to assess if people are doing a good job. I get it. Is it just me… though… or has this taken a “turn” lately? I feel like I’m being judged… like……
Always an option. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.” — W. C. Fields You’re working with your favorite coding assistant bot, but things aren’t working out the way you had hoped. What do you do? In reality, you’re presented with a simple, binary choice… keep going (try to steer in a different direction, correct problems, or…
Reclaim those lost “opportunity costs” of typing in code. Your AI assistant is trying to help you… Let it. (You don’t have to trust it completely) I’m lazy. I think that makes me efficiently use my time. I think that lets me save my energy for things that matter more than whether I need a colon or a semicolon to separate these elements of my PATH environment variable (or do I have the time to…
Of Phosphorous Dragons and Clay Cantilevers AUTHORS NOTE: This article is different from any previous article on pairingwithbots.org . It’s a good opportunity to test out our AI Slop-detection skills… these are not my words… exactly. BUT… they’re not the result of a simple prompt or based on made-up fictional stories or hallucinations. They are the result of a few hours of work Pairing with a Bot…
I’ve pair programmed with a really diverse group of people over the years, Claude, Gemini, Kimi, and their ilk are really no different… so why all the fuss about giving them the reins? Why is your code so weird, Claude? I’m not weird, you’re weird! Literally billions upon billions of dollars have been and continue to be spent in “aligning” LLM models with humans. Which is to say, to do the least…
Developing Software: It’s everyone’s job now. Pairing with Bots is about trying to apply some of the early agile practices to our new AI-assisted coding reality. I’ve been on this journey for almost a year now, and I have to tell you, it’s been an adjustment for me on a personal, and dare I say, psychological level. Among the most pressing questions weighing on my mind is: How do we collaborate as…
I hate corporate job titles. I’ve been many variations of “software engineer” in my long career… junior engineer, senior engineer, principal engineer, security engineer, test automation engineer, engineering manager… were they really descriptive of what I actually did? With a few exceptions, no . In fact, I haven’t felt much like an “engineer” at all. While it cannot be denied that there are…
Do you really need to have a code editor anymore? (Hint: you’re not still trying to drive, are you? I won’t take away your footbrake , I promise.) Olde-school minimalism is so attractive A little over 6 months ago, I started experimenting with Claude Sonnet 3.5 and the Cline plugin to VS Code… to help me overcome my lack of TypeScript experience (I’m mostly a Python developer now, but previously…
Take a sad trend, and make it better! The world’s a little colder when you play it cool Even if you’re not that interested in technology trends, it was hard to miss some of the innovations announced at Google.io . Literally as I write this, I was sent a hilariously realistic Veo 3 video entitled “ Yeti vlog ”. I think we can all expect a lot more of that in the weeks and months to come. But I…