We need a single word that means "videotape" or "film" that does not involve either tape or film. "Record a video" is too much of a mouthful. This is the verbal equivalent of using an 8-inch floppy disk icon to mean "save." How many people who click that even know what that square thing even _is_?

Quality maps directly to trust. Nobody trusts buggy software. If those bugs somehow got you to market first, those same bugs will drive your customers into your competitor's open arms in a heartbeat. Once trust is lost, it's lost forever. 1/3

I just want to throw this out to all the "all AI is garbage with no redeeming value" folks. This is not an LLM, of course, but it is AI.

AI is a bubble, but too many people confuse a bad investment strategy with the tech itself. AI will not go away after the bubble bursts any more than websites went away after the dot-com crash. The tech is too useful (though not the panacea the hype mongers would have us believe). 1/3

AOC: "Extreme level of wealth inequality leads to social instability and drives authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and really dangerous domestic internal politics. That is a direct outcome of the failure of democracies over decades to deliver."

Many of the comments on this post 👇 have gone of on a I-hate-VCs tangent. (That wasn't the point I was trying to make 😄). I, personally, would avoid VC money if I could—too many strings attached—but most of the software we use daily was VC funded. The system is not ideal, but it does get results.

Of VC-backed products, 78% fail: 42% fail because nobody wants them. 17% because they don't really solve the problem they claim to solve. 19% because they were no different from competing products or couldn't evolve with the market. And that's just VC-backed companies. 1/2

In honor of today's 25th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto, I'd like to remind everybody that the very first sentence starts with: "We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it…" The critical word in that sentence is "uncovering." They didn't say "uncovered," which would 1/12

A user story is not a code word for specification or a requirement or any description of work. It is not a ticket. It is not a to-do item. It is not something you can build. 1/5

I've been using the term "AI-assisted software engineering" as a counter to "vibe coding," which I see as something else entirely. The term itself is a mouthful, though. Can anybody recommend something more pithy?

No metric improves product decisions. You do that by talking to your customers. What does improve product decisions is empathy, feedback, and understanding the market.

I keep reading that quality needs to take a back seat to profit, but I'm beginning to think that the people who say that don't define "quality" the same way I do. Let's take "well architected" as an example. 1/9

Demanding an estimate guarantees the estimate will not be useful to the business and will always drive costs up. Software engineers all know that estimates are useless. 1/6

I'm not a fan of story points; I don't use or recommend them. That said, they can have some value inside the team when used as originally intended. The original XP team invented story points to obfuscate time estimates from management. 1/5

“Too many GPUs make you lazy.” One way to address AI energy usage is to improve (and specialize) the models. Mistral is a good example of that: t.ly/6dTxd

The AI/LLM haters are legion, but they have a very real concern about the environmental cost of the tech. To say that all LLMs burn down the planet is simplistic, however. We have to evaluate the vendors and models and choose based on their commitment to clean energy. 1/11

Maybe the third time's a charm 😄. Yesterday, I posted that we could eliminate things like country-name dropdowns and replace them with free text, perhaps using an LLM to correct errors. 1/8

So, a few weeks ago, I posted about those ridiculous country-name drop-downs with 100 or more lines and similar 50-line ones for US state codes. (Don't get me started on year-picker dropdowns with 100+ sequential numbers in them 🙄. 1/6

I keep reading posts about people who wrote applications entirely with "zero coding." They say they don't read the code and instead refine the application using increasingly precise prompts. I have some questions: * Is the application nontrivial? 1/7

If we need to invest $206,756.00 in 40 Mac minis (fully loaded), something's seriously wrong with the way we do our work.

I've noticed that the new way trolls discount ideas that make them uncomfortable is by accusing me of being an LLM. Since these comments almost always refer to me as "that guy" or "buddy," I can't help but wonder if they are LLM-generated 😄.

High school students using AI to write college application essays that are then graded by AI from admissions departments is a great example of how AI usage devalues systems while people can accurately point to “productivity gains” from using AI.

A few days back, I wrote about how AI can be useful, and that we ignore or reject it at our peril. Paradoxically, as several people pointed out, some not very politely, longer-term productivity in many (maybe most) shops that use AI code generation has gone down. That's absolutely true. 1/8

How do you measure productivity? Let’s start by talking about the engineering obsession with quantitative metrics. You can easily measure productivity on an assembly line. The faster a car comes off the line at a given quality level, the more productive you are. 1/10

This image is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the usual code-review process. People debate the grammar, even though there's no universe in which the prepositional phrase "of cell phones and earbuds" can be the subject of a sentence. 1/9

Any software manufacturer that forces its customers into email-based 2FA is losing its customers. Get with the program.

<rant> I'm getting tired of AI being the boogie man. The problem is not AI. The problem is the people who use AI to do reprehensible things. AI is not taking away anybody's job. The people who run the companies that use AI are taking away people's jobs. 1/10

🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Judging by the comments on my most recent AI-related post, the terms "AI" and "The boogie man" have become synonyms. What happened to nuance?

Discounting a technology or process because the evidence is "anecdotal" is a straw man. There are no studies for most practices & tools, and when there are, the numbers are flawed. For example, you cannot measure productivity using PRs or KLOC. Generating lots of garbage quickly is not productive.

This is a common argument against AI. All the AI does is create code, which is the easiest part of software engineering. Humans are the architects. Humans assure the quality. It's like building a house with unskilled labor that requires supervision. No thinking is outsourced. LLMs can't think.

Discounting a technology or process because the evidence is "anecdotal" (i.e., people's actual experience) is a straw man. There are no quant studies, & when there are, the numbers are flawed. E.g., you can't measure productivity with PRs or KLOC. Creating lots of garbage quickly is not productive.

Of the critical responses to this post that weren't just invective and name-calling (I've blocked those particular people), one important observation was that people complained about having to deal with AI-generated garbage that other people checked into the repo. 1/

AI-assisted software engineering is like the flush toilet 😄 I just read an article about "dumb phones." There is a class of people who have decided that smartphones are evil, so they've returned to phone technology circa 1990. No apps. No big screen or QWERTY keyboard. Just a phone (and txt). 1/10

Normally, I wouldn't hoist a post like this 👇 to the top level, but this is a great example of someone who can be easily replaced by Claude Code. When a machine can write the code for you, other factors become more important. Just sayin'.

Why is it that when I posted about culture, recently, very few people seemed to think I was talking about a culture of kindness, respect, trust, and inclusion? Judging by the comments, the situation in the software industry is bleak. Read Sheridon's "Joy Inc." There's a culture I can get behind!

George Floyd died in 2020, so the US said, "OMG! Racism is bad! We can change!" In 2021, the US *talked about* some modest reforms. In 2022 and 2023, white grievance against those reforms had reached fever pitch. 2024 saw record police funding, record cops killing Black people, and DEI rollback.🤷🏿‍♂️

Responding to several earlier kneejerk reactions to a partial reading of yesterday's thread: I am well aware that "cultural fit" is often used as an excuse for bigotry. This is a perfect example of how culture dominates an organization. 1/4

Many people are latching onto a culture of bigotry, and orgs using "culture fit" to exercise that bigotry. There are also cultures of kindness & inclusion, however, and "culture fit" in that situation excludes the haters. Culture goes both ways. Ideally, we can choose the culture we will work in.

I want to explicitly bring up a critical issue implied by this post. Sometimes, the culture of a company is racist, ageist, ableist, one of religious intolerance, … . That's reprehensible, but doesn't change the fact that it's part of their culture and is hard to change. 1/

Should culture fit be a factor in hiring, or is tech skill sufficient? To me, software development is first and foremost a social activity performed by humans, with all the baggage that comes with being human. Technical competence is nice, but it is not the core of who we are. 1/10

You cannot get the work under control unless you control the work! 😄 Many teams suffer from out-of-control demands on their time. (It's a clue if your backlog has 10 years of work on it.) Those demands cause a lot of damage. 1/12

A lot of people didn't read to the end of yesterday's post about working together👇, so let me make it clear: going back to some hell-hole office is not the same as physically working together. I'm advocating the latter, not the former. The point is to get together, not where. 1/11

I'm going to get yelled at for this post, but here goes: I've been thinking about companies dragging people back into the office, kicking and screaming. 1/12

When a train can move at 300+ MPH (as they do in France, Japan, and elsewhere), you can live 300 miles away from your office and still have 1-hour commute. We do not have a housing crisis in the US, we have a transportation crisis. The train costs way less than building houses.

Just read (in Kim and Yegge's "Vibe Coding"): "… reported that 70% of developers experienced [AI-related] productivity gains of 20–30%, as measured by increases in commits, pull requests, and overall feature-delivery velocity." This sort of reporting bothers me. 1/7

Seems like the good folks at Amazon could use some instruction in basic arithmetic 😄.

Much of the dysfunction you find in organizations, and most of the problems you find in software development, come from the fact that people—engineers in particular—believe that complex systems (in the Cynefin sense) can be understood and controlled. They can not. 1/7

Proof is overrated. This is a brilliant talk by Rory Sutherland: [youtu.be/lhlS-Wds02M...] where he makes two essential points. First, it's a huge problem when "rational" people get veto power over creative, innovative, "irrational" people. 1/11

The notion of big, infrequent software releases is, to me, a really, really bad idea. First, there's no practical reason for it, given that we don't release on physical media anymore. 1/13