This!

This is a nice illustration of what I called "redressing the balance" in an essay for Onward! 2024: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... Very different vocabulary, same message: we have been focusing too much on code as features and thereby neglected code as a knowledge representation.

Systems are often seen as a set of features. An alternative is to regard them as encoded knowledge. 1/

The PR process is broken. Rethinking our tools and processes, "deterministic contextual tools", to fit engineering patterns that are still relevant.

"I cannot read every line of code." Indeed, nor should you. But this does not mean you should not understand the code. Understanding systems boils down to answering questions about them. Use deterministic contextual tools to produce those answers. That's it. Read more at: moldabledevelopment.com

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

AI can create code fast. But it does not mean you cannot and should not understand it at the speed at which it creates it.

Funny

Beautiful

I could not attend #ATmosphereConf2026. But I am wondering: is there already a development environment for building for ATProto? Something like: bsky.app/profile/tudo... bsky.app/profile/tudo... bsky.app/profile/tudo...

Beautiful

Nice! A while ago I also wrote about Diffie-Hellman as an illustrated children’s book with no math whatsoever (using a paint mixing analogy) www.amazon.com/dp/173741905X/

We're still taking applications until April 13. We've received 240+ so far so maybe it isn't advisable for us to continue to open this position, since we read every single application. So no "AI" generated ones please, don't think we can't tell. Interested in applying but procrastinating? Do it!👇🏽

Your systems are already valuable. They got you to where you are. But within them lies much more dormant potential. How can you uncover that potential? By improving your ability to understand your system. Once you understand it better, you can move faster, and thus create more value.

"Text is everything now. Text is AI's native medium. Stay in text." Didn't we have this conversation before with just slightly different arguments?

Trying to wrap my head around about this. But it is such an interesting concept. Unfortunately, it is only limited to Glamorous Toolkit, correct? I wish more IDE's could have adopted this. :)

"Humans reading AI-generated code doesn’t scale." Actually, humans reading code never scaled. We just pretended it did. We need a science of how to reason about systems without reading code (AI summaries are not the solution). You can start at: moldabledevelopment.com

LLM answers only look like answers. They are actually possible hypotheses in disguise.

Perspective

This dystopian future is here now. "Emily, who NPR is only identifying by her first name because she fears retribution from the federal government, says she followed an ICE vehicle at a safe distance into a parking lot. www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/nx-...

Perspective

"Please continue" That's what the documentation for Claude Opus 4.6 says when you happen to get empty messages from the magic box. I'm not sure whether "Please" is necessary, but I didn't dare try anything else for fear of upsetting the machine.

The greatest architectural decision of our time: where we value the human in the decision making process.

Understanding systems is not the only problem to solve, but it is the most costly and consequential one we face today.

"Claude Code is the most effective diagnostic and debugging tool in computing history" You might want to check the baseline you compare against. 1/

1) Software engineering is not about building features 2) Refactoring is a business problem 3) Software engineering is not an engineering practice 4) LLMs will not replace software engineers 5) Architects don't make decisions by @swardley.bsky.social & @tudorgirba.com medium.com/feenk/rewild...

I understand why one would say that Claude Code is the most effective diagnostic and debugging tool. It's indeed much faster and better than going to StackOverflow. But that perspective is misinformed: bsky.app/profile/tudo... That said, you should still heed the overall advice of exploiting LLMs.

@swardley.bsky.social and I just published Chapter 6 of our Rewilding Software Engineering. It's about 8 myths in software engineering. Linked at: moldabledevelopment.com "Software engineering is about building functionality" "Refactoring is not a business problem" 1/

Nice idea

Cloudflare outage was due to a small change. Azure outage was due to a small change. Amazon outage was due to a small change. Please, tell me again how details don't matter in software engineering.

It seems that AI does not magically solves the legacy problem. by @raymyers.bsky.social ainativedev.io/news/ai-hate...

When I am elected, I will read the code DOGE wrote. I will find out how they stole your data and what they have done with it. And then I will tell you

When all code is being created by AI, what is the bottleneck? “We still should review and make sense of it” Ok. Want to know a secret? “Secret? Yes.” Making sense of existing code has always been the bottleneck.

Ready to change how you think about software development? @tudorgirba.com & Kris Jenkins showcase Glamorous Toolkit & discuss Moldable Development.

We can only perceive software systems through tools. This makes tools essential for anything we do with software systems, and in particular for software engineering. And we should pay attention to our tools' characteristics as they will influence how we are going to think.

More of this kind of reporting, please!

Neat

If you're catching up on the horrors of AI-induced psychosis, LLM girlfriends, and people waving ChatGPT at experts to tell experts they are wrong because the all-knowing LLM says so... This article I wrote in May both predicts this slide and shows a way out. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Perspective

Recently, I gave a talk in which I introduced Moldable Development through a parallel to Test-driven Development based an extensive case study of an extraordinary organization: Lifeware. lepiter.io/feenk/moldab...

38M! 🎉

Covid vaccination saved ~2.5 million lives between 2020-2024 jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Funny!

1/ I'm feeling real pain at the cuts to Indiana public universities, especially IU, especially cogsci. These are some of the biggest brains in cogsci and edupsych in the world, but why do *I* care? I'll tell you what they've done *for me, personally*. ↵ www.ipm.org/news-section...

The open letter and accompanying petition asking publishers "to make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines" garnered more than 600 signatures within a few hours.

Nothing to something is probably easier now. But something to something good is still very hard.

It's like piloting. Most planes fly on autopilot, even land on it. But we are now at a place where a random passenger will decide that they can now fly the plane. And many times it'll work out fine - for a while. So the autopilot salesforce tried to sell the "no pilot needed" concept.

The value of your software system today is given by its external functionality. Tomorrow, its value is given by how well you can adapt it. This depends on your ability to understand the system’s internals enough to guide its evolution. Invest in this ability as if your business depends on it.