I often hear: "The users will _love_ this." They don't.

I've noticed a common scenario, which I call Complaint-Driven Development (CDD). A company introduces a new "feature" that people hate. When enough people scream about it, the vendor reluctantly adds an option to turn it off. Off is never the default, which people also hate. 1/4

If your entire job is: receive spec, write code, hand it off, repeat... you should be worried. As @allenholub.bsky.social put it: coding was maybe 15% of the job. The rest was thinking, designing, testing, talking to people. AI made it impossible to ignore. open.spotify.com/episode/41gZ...

Agile is dead. At least the word is. @allenholub.bsky.social won't use it anymore. Neither will @kentbeck.com with XP. Not because the ideas failed. Because the industry turned them into a certification machine. -> stellarwork.start.page

The notion of delaying decisions to "the last responsible moment" is important. For some decisions, that moment is pretty early. For example, we need to develop strategic plans and do customer and market research early in the product development process.

I keep hearing that AI has made Agile irrelevant. Okay. I'll throw in the towel. Let's dump Agile altogether. So, instead, here is by far the best AI-focused way of working that I know: First, - The way we treat people and work with them is more important than processes and tools

All data centers combined account for about 0.5% of global carbon emissions. Of that, ~10% is AI-related, so AI is responsible for 0.05% of global carbon emissions. Cars and other transportation account for ~25% of total emissions. Just 'sayin.

The very existence of options and settings is usually a sign of indecisiveness and poor product research. They tell me the programmer hasn't done their homework (e.g., talking to customers), so they have no idea how something should work. 1/7

I've just read about "tokenmaxing," which uses the number of LLM tokens you blow through in a month as a sort of sick productivity metric. This is insane. 1/8

The thing that makes a "mature" team "mature" is what the people who comprise the team know. It has nothing to do with how long they've worked. There are many people who have done the same wrong thing year after year for decades. You want a mature team? Educate them. 1/2

There isn't an LLM on the planet that understands architecture. No LLM can create an effective architecture. Architecture is contextual, dependent on things like the domain. Architects use judgment and creativity. No "AI" can do either. There is no "good" cookie-cutter architecture. 1/6

Pull Requests (PRs) solve one problem only: you have broken up the work into small chunks that are completed by untrusted (and often unknown) individuals working in isolation without support or help, who produce potentially destructive changes, … 1/5

ICE detention deaths are now occurring at a rate of roughly one every four days. Three weeks ago that rate was one every six days. The pace is accelerating, and Congress has not launched a single investigation.

The attached post is interesting in that it argues AI is dangerous, contrasting it with a word processor, which the author claims is not. Putting aside the inflammatory rhetoric, let's focus on that "dangerous" notion. 1/12

I mentioned TDD in an earlier post, and it became clear from the responses that there's some confusion about what TDD is. TDD stands for test-driven _development_ (or design). The "test-driven" is an adjective modifying the word "development" (or "design"). 1/10

In all the foofaraw surrounding AI, many people seem to have forgotten that product development is not all about coding, and that coding is maybe 10% of the actual work. 1/7

I have yet to see any proof that any mass layoffs have anything to do with AI. AI is a smokescreen used to hide business-as-usual firings to artificially inflate stock prices & hedge against the Trump-induced economic downturn. The Iran debacle will lead to more firings as the economy tanks. #NotAI

It hasn't gone unnoticed that, since @Amazon's pushing of AI onto its engineers, the enshittification of their software has accelerated. I see this particularly in the video player. Hover-based dropdowns don't drop, or if they do, collapse immediately without a selection. 1/6

When Python came up the other day, several people chimed in with things like "Python isn't a 'real' language." Made me wonder where language snobism comes from. I'm sure many of the replies were jokes, but it's a real phenomenon. I'm a pragmatist. To me, one language is as good as another. 1/3

One common critique of AI is that it's imprecise and nondeterministic. We programmers have held too long to the notion that precision—in algorithms, in the programming languages we use, in the data we collect—is essential. 1/13

I can't say that I'll be boycotting Chili's as it has been years since I've been in one, and you can't really boycott a restaurant you already don't go to. That said, I'll be happy not to change my habits, transphobia leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

People tell me that using an LLM to create code will rot my programming-language skills. So? We work in a changing landscape, and agility is essential to survive. My goal is not to be the best Python (or whatever) programmer on the planet. 1/9

Business 101: Back of the napkin. I just posted that a programmer who makes $200K costs the company about $200/hour, and a lot of people deigned to "correct" my math. Given that these back-of-the-napkin cost discussions are useful, let's correct that correction. 1/10

I keep reading about the "insane" costs of using an AI, citing numbers like $1,000/month/developer. A programmer who makes $200K/year costs the company $200/hour (salary * load). $1,000 represents 5 hours of programmer time spread over an entire month. 1/2

A short public-service announcement: I am hypersensitive to X-like insults and mean-spirited sarcasm. I love a good debate, but the instant somebody drops into insults or ad hominem attacks, I immediately block them without engaging. Let's keep things civil, please.

When I quoted: "Gartner predicts that by next year, half of the companies that fired workers for AI are going to hire them back," a couple of days ago, I got a host of "all AI is evil, so take that!" crowing, as if rehired _tech_ workers will be going back to using manual processes alone. 1/4

The next time some manager or lead programmer tells you that you should be able to do X in 10 minutes with AI, agree only if there's money on the table, literally. Have them do whatever they just asked you to do, and if they can't finish in 10 minutes, you win.

"Gartner predicts that by next year, half of the companies that fired workers for AI are going to hire them back. Also, 9 months ago, Microsoft…proclaimed that 30% of their code was written by AI, and since then, we've seen some of the worst software issues at the company in its history." 1/2

No, AI is not coming for your developer job, regardless of the nonsense the hype mongers are pushing. (I'm talking just about developer jobs—it obviously impacts other areas.) That's not to say the layoffs aren't real, but rather that the corporations are hiding normal corporate behavior behind 1/11

In my experience, the vast majority of waste in a software shop is time spent building things nobody wants on top of overly complex architectures that solve problems we don't have. Focus on that. Put solving your customer's actual (not imagined) problems first. 1/3

Dude. Solved it dude. Code the vibe dude. #VibeCoding youtube.com/shorts/9693I...

This thread violates the "shut up and just talk about programming" pseudo-rule that many seem to think I should follow, even if it does talk about AI, so don't read it if that bothers you 😄. 1/7

openai employees: you can, indeed, just quit.

The U.S. Senate must be clear: no war with Iran.

Your opposition to war can just be that war is evil. it doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

This is your doom-scrolling checkpoint. Stop for a moment and remember joy before you continue.

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength" We are living in Oceania.

When this ICE shit started, a mutual I’d never met asked how to help. I sent him to a friend’s kid’s preschool that was struggling to find patrollers. He’s been there almost daily, even in brutal cold, at a school where he didn’t know anyone, to keep folks safe. We finally met and got beers tonight.

The second you leave this country for even a few days, you realize the place you call home is decaying at an almost exponential pace. The realization that you don't have to live like this is stark, and that nobody in power is taking tangible actions to fix it in your lifetime is even starker.

Every time I talk about the issues and problems surrounding LLM (or Vibe-coded) ***product*** development, I get a bunch of off-topic comments (which the writers seem to think are refutations) along the lines of "but I built this useful small thing for myself." 1/6

One of the reasons I'm dubious about the 'nontechie builds a product with AI' posts is the sheer impracticality. 1/9

notorious radical left communist rag says tax the rich

Okay, let's get the AI discussion entirely out of the hype-and-theory realm. For the "I'll just vibe code and trust the LLM folks," here's an interesting page showing results from asking several LLMs to perform a simple coding task (creating an HTML/CSS clock): [clocks.brianmoore.com/]. 1/6

Yeah, probably a more 'do it yourself' thing so you can verify the math works, etc. And Even an analog clock for web looks different from different models. This site is a good demo of AI code limitations tbh, it re-tries every minute with wildly different success each time. clocks.brianmoore.com

I know people claim they're completely nontechnical and have vibe-coded entire products without any human ever looking at any of the code. Thousands of lines a day or more! they say. Insanely productive! Programming is dead! 🙄 1/3

My experience with LLM-generated code is that it's always wrong somewhere. When I say that, people tell me that we should have the LLM write tests, but those tests will be wrong here and there as well. I guess we could ask the LLM to write tests for the tests, but how does that recursion stop? 1/2

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