Owen's blog
LLMs keep getting more capable, but humans stay in the loop, bottlenecking potential output. Moving us out of the loop is the implicit goal. But it’s hard when we target human-oriented outcomes – UIs, visual layouts, things humans spot-check. How do you close the iteration loop without a human squinting at the screen? Enter intermediate representations. An IR (in this context) is a…
Preamble : It’s time for my second newsletter. About a month and a half since the last one – a bit over my monthly target cadence. I’ve got some interesting stuff today. Source Code Is the New Assembly Line 4892 was off and it was already 11pm. I rubbed my eyes; at what point does exhaustion outweigh my principles? I was too tired to even name the problem, let alone fix it. I’d traded coding…
Three connected thoughts that keep sharpening. Against the grain. We’re bolting LLMs onto decades of human-oriented software process. Style guides, reviewer agents, architecture prompts. It feels like teaching, but LLMs don’t learn. Every conversation is a cold start. You’re not building understanding, you’re performing it on repeat. Lossy compression of something that resists compression. When…
Software dev from first principles: manual code review doesn’t make sense anymore. It’s too much of a bottleneck. Rather merge and git bisect problems. This shifts risk right towards prod, which means we’ll see more products around software lifecycle infrastructure (canary deploys, automated rollback, observability) and fewer around PR review bots. Related: I distrust tools I don’t want to use…
Hello friends, welcome to my first newsletter. Here’s where I’ll keep you apprised of what I’ve been up to – and thinking about. I’m writing this for a couple reasons: to keep myself accountable to writing and to make sure my friends and peers (you) still keep me top of mind. It’s been almost two months since I left Grafana. I planned (and did, more on that later) to incorporate a new company in…