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.

Harvey Weinstein has been convicted of sex crimes for a second time in New York. His retrial followed a 2020 conviction in New York, which was overturned on procedural grounds.

Prompt injection means email viruses are back. A researcher found a security vulnerability where you send an email with hidden instructions which when CoPilot scans the email, executes and then hides the source of the instructions. It took Microsoft 5 months to fix the issue.

I was so nervous when I gave this talk. I showed several pieces from our work at feenk that we've never shown before: - A story that now appears in the Rewilding Software Engineering book I am writing with @swardley.bsky.social about assessing the slowness of a data pipeline. 1/

Programming is changing: tests, infra, and now tools are code. Moldable Development lets you shape tools as you code. Watch @tudorgirba.com‬’s demo with Glamorous Toolkit:

To vibe code or not to vibe code? That's not quite the question. There is a middle ground that does not require us to suspend our ability to understand and make decisions about our system. It's almost vibe coding but not quite. It's AI-enabled software engineering. youtu.be/-P83DjtSFvk?...

To vibe, or not to vibe, that is the question. Find the answer in chapter 5 of the Rewilding Software Engineering book @swardley.bsky.social and I are writing in the open: medium.com/feenk/chapte...

Checked a Macron rumor this morning using SIFT Toolbox, and once again was impressed with how much difference a multi-lingual fact-checking tool can make.

Beautiful

🎙️ What if your codebase felt more like a workspace than a maze? On today’s #GOTOpodcast, @tudorgirba.com & @julianwood.com dive into moldable development: 🔧 Custom tools for complex systems 🧠 AI that helps you think, not just code 🏠 Code that feels… livable 🎧 Listen: gotopia.tech/podcast

Ever wondered how tech giants make strategic decisions? In this chat with @charleshumble.bsky.social , @swardley.bsky.social shows how visual mapping revolutionized business strategy & tech evolution - from challenging CEOs to predicting industry shifts.

This is your periodic reminder to never take Kevin Roose seriously about anything again.

Glamorous Toolkit made on the front page of Hacker News. Some interesting conversations happening there. In particular, quite a number of comments say that it's not clear how it works, what it does, and even why it exists at all: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360...

I still see the unfortunate advice saying that debuggers are not useful and that tests is all we need. Tests are useful, but so are debuggers, particularly when they are made to match your system. Here is a talk by Andrei Chis showing how that works in #GToolkit: youtu.be/jAO0lZ6tNKU?...

Before talking about how you want to change your system, first make sure you see your current system. Really see it. That's a prerequisite. Oh, and manually created diagrams and documents do not count.

Ask n technical people "what is architecture?" and you might get n+1 answers. Change the question slightly to "what is architecture for?" and you will get just one: to support decision making. Read about software engineering as decision making in the book I am writing with @swardley.bsky.social 👇

Code is not a crime scene. It's a wonderful phenomenon waiting to be discovered and appreciated.

When was the last time you heard developers talk about how they read code?

"Software engineering is a decision making process... By decreasing the time it takes to ask and answer questions, we get to churn through more of them. The more we do that, the more likely it is to discover new value and interesting solutions." Read more here 👇

I've used "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe" a few times when talking to organisations. There's so much mythology around complexity and cost, and a fear of "non-standard". Decisions aren't the hardest thing - they're the only thing, in the end.

A) Code reflects architecture. B) Architecture reflects code. For the longest time, our industry ran under the assumption that only A) is true. This led to a world of pain because, well, that's what happens if you ignore B). 1/

Here is a database engineer that onboarded himself into Glamorous Toolkit giving a tour of how to use it to work with PostgreSQL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY4y...

Here it is. The fourth chapter of the Rewinding Software Engineering book that @swardley.bsky.social and I are writing in the open. It covers quite some ground: from the need to make systems explainable to the characteristics our development environments should have. Let us know what you think.

Thoroughly enjoyed working with Tudor Girba on writing chapter 4 of Rewilding Software Engineering : flexing those thinking muscles. Some fairly meaty issues in this chapter. Hopefully, as with mapping, others will find it useful. Chapter 4: Flexing those thinking muscles medium.com/feenk/rewild...

If you go in a meeting to talk about an existing software system, bring the system in that meeting. Otherwise, you will be talking about the various beliefs people have about the system. How should you do that? Through contextual tools that help you answer various questions quickly. 1/

Reading medium.com/feenk/rewild... by @swardley.bsky.social & @tudorgirba.com something for the @themydatacompany.bsky.social discussion come September

Who wrote the code does not matter much. Who has to make sense of it matters much more.

How long does it take to answer a question about your software system? And how long until you get to a new interesting question? 1/

Funny

Enjoyable -> How we used maps to help a government agency figure out its technology strategy - www.staatslabor.ch/en/how-we-us...

happy first birthday to Bluesky, and what a year it's been! with every day, the need for an open network that puts people first becomes increasingly clear. we're glad to be building this with you. after all, the heart of a social network is the people.

Chapters 1-3 of Rewilding Software Engineering and how to deal with legacy environments. More to come, as we find time. Chapter 1: Introduction medium.com/feenk/rewild... Chapter 2: How we make decisions medium.com/feenk/rewild... Chapter 3: Questions and Answers medium.com/feenk/rewild...

We (@swardley.bsky.social and I) published a new installment of our Rewilding Software Engineering book on Medium: Chapter 1: Introduction medium.com/feenk/rewild... Chapter 2: How we make decisions medium.com/feenk/rewild... Chapter 3: Questions and answers medium.com/feenk/rewild... 1/

At the end of last year, Simon Wardley and I published the first draft of a chapter from our book on "Rewilding software engineering". We decided to write it in the open as a series of blog posts to gather feedback as we write. And feedback we received. Much more and detailed than we expected. 1/