There's been a lot in the press lately about even Stanford CS graduates having a hard time getting jobs, so I looked up the Stanford curriculum. 1/8

Let's talk about AI Hype and the Theory of Constraints. From a business perspective, the key metric is "lead time." The time it takes to get an idea to the point where it's producing revenue ("in the customer's hands"). 1/10

Was reading this morning that CS majors are having a hard time getting their first job "because of AI." The same article quoted someone lucky enough to get a job saying it was like working 3 jobs at once. If AI were displacing programmers, why are they now forced to work 3x as much? This is not AI.

It seems to me that we all need to significantly narrow the definition of a "stakeholder" to people who have a vested interest in our work's success. Your failure must be their failure, your success their success. 1/12

OH: "I’ve always seen agile as being a bunch of tiny waterfalls rather than one big one." Erm… That seems like a failure to grasp the concept to me. Instead: 1) Start with the users' story. That's a conversation where a user (or a small group of them) describes a problem to you. 1/7

The notion of "accountabilities" in the Scrum Guide makes my skin crawl. The word "accountable" means that heads will roll if you fail. 1/7

At least the way I use it, an "AI" does not write any code for me. It gives me suggestions as I write the code. Consequently, I've been wondering about the critique of AI-assisted software engineering that LLM outputs are not reproducible. Who cares? 1/3

It interests me that, despite plenty of evidence that AI coding is a useful tool, easily substantiated by just using CoPilot, Cursor, or equivalent for a few weeks, there are still programmers pushing back. 1/13

It's complete BS to say "AI creates code in seconds." That's just a lie. AI creates a first draft in seconds, and that draft has to be extensively edited before it's even marginally acceptable as production-quality code. It moves the work from authoring to editing. 1/2

As an architect, the whole "mobile first" notion of building native mobile apps first seems silly to me. Yes, many people use their phones as their primary computer—I'm not saying that running on a phone isn't critical. 1/7

Question. Like it or not, we are entering a world where computer systems are not fully deterministic. AI components are here to stay, and they're all probabilistic in nature. A lot of our practices, however, assume determinism. 1/3

To me, nowadays at least, the presence of a dropdown list instead of freeform input is almost always a sure sign of programmer laziness or incompetence. The worst offender is a dropdown that lists all years between 1800 and 2025 as potential birthdays. 1/7

I tell this story periodically, but it seems like it's time again: General Motors ran an automobile manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, that was one of the worst in the country. Accident rates and defects were astronomical. Absenteeism was through the roof. 1/12

An interesting choice. The devs have been spending too much time watching historical romances or GoT. I wonder how many people in the nobility have been calling tech support, demanding proper titles in the name-entry field, and why have they left out Sir and Dame and skipped straight to viscounts?

Interesting wording from Google. Are there alien settlements, too? How about dragon settlements? I'd like directions, please.

The attached screen grab should make everybody who programs AI systems pay attention. As programmers, we should never forget that so-called AI is just numbers and probabilities. 1/10

Fifteen Years xkcd.com/3172/

We all work under constraints like time or budget, even when working incrementally. You do not solve that problem with a plan, however, particularly an inflexible one. (You do need a product strategy, but that's a higher-level thing. 1/5

To me, the whole idea of managing scope is antiquated and not particularly useful. It assumes a fixed up-front plan from which you can deviate. It assumes a schedule based on that up-front plan. However, scope defined upfront does not work, and it never has. 1/4

I often see a website for a company that ought to know better using URLs that look like phishing attempts. Microsoft, for example, sometimes shuttles you to "microsoftonlione.com" (with a side trip to something called live.com) to log in. 1/4

You know, I'm not sure I ever really read the Pond Rules at our local nature preserve all that closely before

I'll admit that I occasionally watch Forged in Fire (a reality show where people make edged weapons under time pressure—don't judge 😄). One of the things I find particularly interesting is how the contestants continually make the same mistakes that brought down contestants in previous shows. 1/9

I will never understand how people do not see the tight coupling of security and quality. You can't have the former without the latter. They call it an "exploit" because the hacker is exploiting a bug. 1/2

Let’s talk about “Move fast and break things.” First of all, Facebook itself changed its motto to “Move fast with stable infrastructure” in 2014. So much for breaking things, at least if you’re a soulless corporate behemoth. 1/12

The latest Cloudflare and Amazon outages have got me thinking about utilities. We can't build modern software without dependencies. The days of running entirely on the client are over, which I see as a good thing. The cost is that we rely on infrastructure. 1/5

I've worked in "Agile" organizations for my entire 40+ year career, starting with my very first job. 1/8

<rant> A periodic reminder that Sprints, Backlogs, Daily Scrums, Scrum Boards, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Points, Velocity, PIs, etc., have NOTHING AT ALL to do with "Agile." Agility comes from working small, delivering frequently for feedback from actual customers, and adapting based on 1/3

I’m not going to name you publicly, but if you were the speaker who put in the abstract that was so obviously written by ChatGPT it made me groan “Oh, come on” so loud people asked what I was looking at and then they groaned too, you should be almost as embarrassed as the people who accepted it

If you're about to start a sentence with "I shouldn't say this, but" don't say it!

The solution to layoffs is starting your own company. It is not as difficult as people think. You do not need (or want) VC funding. You do not need (or want) a large, complex product or to solve a huge problem. 1/7

Disagreements are not problems. They are opportunities to learn. For example, when I have to prove something that seems intuitively correct to me, I have to drill deeply into things like hard numbers. 1/5

This is heartbreaking. The people causing this are fucking monsters.

To my thinking, "Scrum Master" is not a role. It's a collection of "accountabilities" (to use the makes-me-shudder Scrum Guide terminology) that can be distributed across the team. 1/5

<rant> This is a post about quality. The continued #enshitification of @Amazon set me off. I tried to watch a movie last night. It was filmed in English, but the only version available was dubbed in French with English subtitles. 1/9

Building Ikea furniture this weekend reminded me of two challenging life facts: * If it's not aligned, more force won't help. * If it's aligned, more force won't help. Take that, #996.

One piece of common wisdom that I've come to disagree with is "do the most complicated thing first." In a waterfall world, that's a risk-reduction strategy, but in an incremental development context, it's actually the opposite. 1/7

I've always hated the Apple-style infinitely-long animated web pages where the scroll wheel just moves stuff around on the page rather than scrolling. All that does is add confusion and make me work harder to see actual content. 1/12

I regularly hear about people pushing (and creating PRs) for essentially unreviewed AI-generated work. A "vibe coder" who accepts what the LLM creates without thought is causing more problems than they're worth. It is the responsibility of whoever is using an LLM to write the code to: 1/5

I’ve been thinking about the exuberance (and often hostility) surrounding vibe coding vs other techniques. Vibe coding is not particularly more efficient or productive than other approaches (as many studies show)—it’s just different. 1/11

Yesterday, I posted that the "fail fast" mantra doesn't sit well with me [https://t.ly/fXEzJ]. One thing I don't like about that maxim is the framing. To me, everything we do is an experiment. 1/4

"Fail fast" is not a viable approach to software construction. There's no benefit in constant failure. What we want to do is succeed fast. Do that with small batches and frequent corrections based on feedback. That's not "failure," it's just part of the process. 1/2

Never put security in the hands of amatuers—that includes both product people and "experienced" (but not in security) programmers. On a recent trip to Europe, I made the mistake of logging onto a US web site without using a VPN. 1/5

More and more, I'm seeing AI-generated (or "enhanced") headshots everywhere from LinkedIn to dating sites. To me, at least, that is an immediate no. Relationships, be they employment or personal, are built on trust. An AI-genereated (or even "enhanced") photo is a lie, plain and simple. 1/2

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

Remember when i said we're living in the scariest parts of a Gibson novel thanks to a bunch of dudes who misunderstand Gibson's novels? Well now I want to discuss the verified govt accounts spewing rightwing propaganda— possibly via a bot-run troll farm— & why you should block them for your safety.

#NOKINGS New York City, NY

😍 Boston, you are beautiful. #NoKings

Bear in mind that even after the dot-com bubble burst, we were still making websites. In fact, after the outsource-to-foreign-climes madness had worn off, wages were at a premium because a lot of people had left the industry in the interim, and the people who were left could ask for the stars. 1/7

A periodic reminder that a "do you really want to do that" dialog is an abomination. Yes, I want to do that, or I wouldn't have asked the first time! Also, by the time that dialog pops up, I'm already annoyed because it's in the way of me getting back to whatever I was doing before. 1/4

Why is it that the people who seem to have the strongest negative opinions about Mob/Ensemble programming are usually the people who have never experienced it? The thing they imagine has nothing to do with the real thing, but that doesn't stop them from having opinions. 1/2