About

There are many blogs. This one is mine.

My name is James. I live in Toronto, Ontario with my family, where I write software and play the guitar, badly (although I’m getting better!) Born in San Diego, California, I’ve moved around a lot, having put in time in Northern Virginia, the suburbs of Boston, Chicago, Minnesota, and back to California, before moving up here and becoming a Canadian citizen.

I’ve been programming professionally since the early ’90s, so my beard has plenty of well-earned grey in it. I’ve seen things. I remember the introduction of Fast Ethernet. I wrote Quark X-Press plugins for classic Mac OS. I watched C-beams glitter … no, wait, that wasn’t me.

Lately, I’ve become obsessed with the problem that LLM agents pose for software development. The central question to me is:

“How do we, as creatures with fabulous pattern-matching wetware, focus our scarce and expensive attention in a world where the marginal cost of code is now zero?”

Some thoughts are beginning to cohere. Your Code Review Process Is Theatre is a shot across my own bow. More to come.