software factory more like slop shop

us: we are struggling to figure out the best way to use coding agents, we don't have clarity yet everyone else: our team is moving at speeds unheard of, all our PRs are ai generated, we've cleared 6 years of backlog man we must really suck huh

the discipline is the actual skill. i write specs before i write prompts, review every diff, run tests before merge. the model does the implementation. what i'm really doing is software architecture with a weird new team.

i really don't care about using AI to ship more stuff it's really hard to come up with stuff worth shipping i want to ship the same amount of stuff with higher quality both in product and code

If you are asking engineers to take on product thinking, planning, and risk assessment in addition to their technical work, name it. Define it. Compensate for it. Do not let it happen silently and then wonder why your team is burned out.

Good reads from February

If you've been curious about how to write better specs, reduce context drift, or just get more consistent output from your AI tools, Augment is hosting a free virtual event on Friday on spec-driven development. luma.com/b3u2al1c?tk...

This month's benchmark of AI coding assistants — testing todo app implementations with logic traps across 6 models (Opus, Sonnet, MiniMax, Big Pickle, Gemini 3, and Kimi) and 5 coding agents (Claude Code, Auggie, Gemini, OpenCode, and Warp).

If you're building a terminal-based AI coding agent, it should have: 1. The ability to configure different models for ask vs. act modes. 2. The ability to select an Auto mode, where the model is autoselected depending on the task. 3. Something akin to Claude's insights command.

🚀 Flutter & AI @SoFi: Join us in San Francisco To dive deep into what’s next, our next Flutter San Francisco Meetup is heading to the SoFi office on Wednesday, February 25th. RSVP on Luma:https://luma.com/5uzi5ws4 #Flutter #Dart #GenerativeAI #MobileDev #SFTech

Don’t get attached to what you built. Get attached to what you’re trying to achieve. When you fall in love with specific choices — the architecture, the tool, the approach — you’re forced to get everything right up front. That’s a high bar, and usually the wrong one. boz.com/articles/ide...

Good tech reads from January...

It would be nice if spec-driven development tools adopted some standardization. Every tool has its own: - Spec format - CLI interface - Config structure Right now we're speedrunning the "14 competing standards" xkcd.

Stranger Things feels like it's just turned into a Wikipedia page for the 80s.

Everyone else: spec-driven-development Google: context-driven-development 🤣🤣🤣 developers.googleblog.com/conductor-i...

Tools evolve and complexity increases, yet creativity, curiosity, and systems thinking continue to define great developers. Lowering the barrier for entry doesn't eliminate the need for human expertise—it amplifies it. www.allthingsdistributed.com/2025/11/tec...

The whole Midoriya wants to save Shigaraki thing seems kinda pointless in retrospect 🤷🏾‍♂️

These first episodes of Stranger Things aren't hitting for me like it used to.

I would not call CSS broken, but it's a relic from a bygone era that no longer reflects how developers actually want to build UIs today. thenewstack.io/css-in-js-t...

Rating the Alien/Predator movies by director: 1. James Cameron (Aliens) 2. Dan Trachtenberg (Prey, Predator: Badlands, Predator: Killer of Killers) 3. John McTiernan (Predator) 4. Noah Hawley (Alien: Earth) 5. Fede Álvarez (Alien: Romulus) 6. Ridley Scott (solely for Alien) Then everybody else...

@tanstack.com is an amazing OSS ecosystem and I wish @flutter.dev had something similar.

“Predator: Badlands” is an exceptional sci-fi action thriller with memorable characters, beautiful and terrifying animals (and plants), a structurally airtight script, and lead performances that deserve to be included in discussions of the year’s best www.rogerebert.com/reviews/pred...

Engineering is about maximizing value while minimizing waste. This economic thinking is what separates developers from software engineers. Ignoring the business impact of your technical decisions isn't just bad engineering—it's bad for the business you're building.

The greatest compliment I can give to #Flutter is that it "got it out the mud." Flutter succeeded on merit, without a trendy pre-existing language or ecosystem, or a large zealous community. It achieved global success from a challenging start, with little to no external help.

How many lines of code can a senior engineer maintain? AI can generate thousands of lines in a week. But optimistically, if a senior engineer can only maintain half of that, generation speed outpaces comprehension capacity. That's the new technical debt.

I'm cautious when adopting pub.dev packages maintained by individuals because losing support is a high risk. Solo maintainers can burn out or move on—partly because developer communities don't support them, even when tools drastically increase our productivity.

This month's adventures in AI assistants, the CLI edition... 😄😄😄 Augment (w/ Sonnet 4.5) Cursor Agent (auto) 😐😐😐 Gemini Claude Code (w/ Sonnet 4.5) ☹️☹️☹️ Warp (auto)

Made my day 🤣 youtu.be/QU93N7saW_E...

Everything I ate in Austin 🤤🤤🤤 Ramen Del Barrio Ramen Tatsu-ya Magnolia Cafe Taqueria De Diez Cooper's Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que Licha's Cantina 🙂🙂🙂 Paperboy Ike's Love & Sandwiches Tacos Juanita Korea House Restaurant El Raval JewBoy Sliders Home Slice Pizza

🎬 Just survived Fantastic Fest 2025 yesterday! 7 days of cinema madness. Everything I saw this year:

A study of experienced developers found AI tools made them 19% SLOWER, not faster. Additionally, developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had helped them work 20% faster. metr.org/blog/2025-0...

I read a review disparaging The Long Walk while comparing it unfavorably to The Hunger Games. One is designed for youth with a theatrical flair meant to entertain, while the other is an unflinching, brutal examination of mortality, hope, and an authoritarian, dystopian reality.

Once every five years, I rediscover the nightmare of implementing file uploads using multipart/form-data.

I'm all in on Kumi Morrow after episode 5.

I cope with my AI tool fatigue by learning a new JavaScript framework.

Alien: Earth is only 3 episodes in, but I think it might be the best SciFi show since The Expanse and the best horror show since The Outsider.

"The talent sets the floor, the character sets the ceiling." This is as true in software engineering as it is anywhere else. We all know engineers who can solve problems and write beautiful code. Their talent sets the floor for their career.

A critical take on Vibe Coding with some valid points. Where I disagree is that the internet has always been polluted by low-quality, poorly documented code and misunderstood/misutilized patterns. Like a child, AI's output reflect it's environment. pdelboca.me/writings/202...

JavaScript framework churn ain't got nothing on AI tooling churn.

Looks like the line to get access to Augment CLI is long www.augment.new?ref=REF8NK6N...

Companies still struggle to launch Android and iOS apps simultaneously with feature parity. That's wild.

Netflix is stretching out this last season of Stranger Things like they know I'm cancelling my subscription when it's over.

Musk accidentally turning Grok into MechaHitler is hilariously on brand. xAI and Grok apologize for ‘horrific behavior’ | TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2025/07/12/x...

Do you use pkg:http? We have a beta out that supports canceling requests! We'd love folks to try it out before it goes stable. This was a gnarly change and we wanted to be super careful to not break anyone. See pub.dev/packages/htt... Tracking PR github.com/dart-lang/ht...

AI tools create more bugs than they fix. So be vigilant and treat their code as if it were that of an intern. thenewstack.io/ai-coding-to...

3-way carry bags are the best

I can't with this CGI baby in Squid Games

🤖 Battle of the AI Coding Assistants: A Real-World Flutter App Showdown { by @chimon.bsky.social } chimon.hashnode.dev/battle-of-th... I used Claude Code, Warp, and Gemini CLI to build a trivial Flutter app with some interesting results. #AI #CodingAssistants #Flutter #DevTools

🤖 Battle of the AI Coding Assistants: A Real-World Flutter App Showdown { by @chimon.bsky.social } chimon.hashnode.dev/battle-of-th... I used Claude Code, Warp, and Gemini CLI to build a trivial Flutter app with some interesting results. #AI #CodingAssistants #Flutter #DevTools

I think we are in a golden age for horror. Most of my favorites are within the last 15 years.