The personal page of Ryan Wright: Philosopher-CTO, researcher, software engineer, inventor of the streaming graph
A.I. is causing everyone to raise their expectations of what is possible. Employees can get more done now with less effort. Managers can code again and also expect more out of their teams. But beyond just raising the bar for expectations on productivity, A.I. is causing a reconfiguration of the kinds of skills that separate Junior and Senior staff. On our team, I’ve seen every configuration, and…
A code review methodology for the age of AI-assisted development. The Problem Traditional code review doesn’t work well anymore. Arguably, it never really worked that well for complex changes. But AI-generated code has dramatically illuminated what is wrong with code review. Reviewers scan diffs line by line, leave a few comments about naming or style, rubber-stamp the PR, and move on. The…
It used to be the case that writing a document to clearly express an idea was such a significant obstacle that by the time someone did write said document, it was obviously a valuable artifact because it was clearly thought through and the work was done to carefully craft it. AI broke that. Now having a document is of almost no value at all, because I can generate a long and coherent document on…
The “Erm, Actually” Engineer is becoming obsolete. The greatest benefit of A.I. (and Claude Code in particular) is bridging General and Specific Knowledge. This is what will shape the next decade of software development. “ Specific Knowledge ” is what you know about the details and specifics of a particular library, particular codebase, particular toolchain, particular development history, etc. “…
For the record: I use em dashes all the time. I love em dashes! I did this long before AI tools made it de rigueur. An em dash (—) separates clauses like parenthesis, but without having to demote the clause into a lower tier of importance. Where parentheses whisper another idea, the em dash just interrupts. It interrupts the main idea in order to change direction to a new idea. Use it a second…
It’s like “Warrior-Poet” for the modern age. Software + Philosophy. 1 The history of philosophy is a treasure trove of deep thinking on important ideas. It’s a collection of all the most important ideas that humanity has wrestled with, and all the lifetimes and brilliant minds spent toward making progress on those important ideas. But philosophy was always limited. The problem is that we didn’t…