Two dudes just ran a 2 hour marathon in race conditions. 4.6min/mile (2.8min/km) pace if anyone ever says “it’s a marathon not a sprint” ever again, I’m throwing you out the window

That’s the other side of the LLM coin. Effort used to provide back pressure on bad ideas product debt is still real; perhaps even more real than before

Don’t ask for feedback, ask for input. you now have a room full of supporters instead of detractors and you still get all the same comments

Rewriting my blog to a new tech stack feels like a good testing ground for super long-running agents with a strong plan 🤔 - well-bounded design space - generic problem with known solutions - lots of busywork - know all requirements ahead of time - easy to verify

wow the new caltrains are nice! so much better than I remember, you can barely tell it’s moving

AI now writes 97% of my code. Here’s what I learned Forget the bullshit, just talk to it: • speak clearly • know what you want • get to the point • give all necessary context • write good feedback • iterate swizec.com/blog/ai-now-...

If you see a clown car heading towards a pile of money, get on.

Here’s a fun distributed transactions problem You call an API, it throws a 500 error but successfully does the thing anyway. It is super important that the thing doesn’t happen twice Design a system that handles this

I'm part of the training set*. Does that mean I write like an LLM or that LLMs write like me? *(1500+ articles, a few books, over 15+ years)

ok since AI now writes 97% of my production code apparently, here’s what I’ve learned

ok wtf am I doing with my life 😂

Wanna get better at stuff? Forget frantic social algorithms and youtube videos and things designed to grab your attention – Just Read The Paper it's easy, I promise. very relaxing, high value per time swizec.com/blog/just-re...

The stock market is definitely real

aaaand I'm reading tanstack/start code to figure out how we can run this on lambda stopped working when we upgraded to vite 8 a few weeks ago and nobody noticed. Not what I had in mind this morning while thinking "Huh I haven't had a good engineering problem in a while"

oh no I clicked something and nuked my entire @kit account 0 subscribers (down from 18,000) hope they can recover this for me 🙃

Perfect day to read through a few years of research

Amazing writing. There is no magic, only grind ”humans aren’t cut out for anything. We cut ourselves out. Slowly, with a rusty knife”

You can hold ~6 things in working memory. Put these stats on: - the problem you’re solving - layers of code - relevant state - data models - your solution common mistake is solving too big a problem in each step so you burn the memory slots before even looking at the code

I made a sweet focaccia thing. It’s pretty good No crumble next time

people aren't liking composer 2 huh?

No running for 2 to 3 months. No boxing either Light lower body lifts in 8 weeks, maybe Can work on my bench, I guess Stationary bike allowed soon knee surgery sucks

The older I get the more I judge vendors by their operational excellence please don’t be another thing in my life I have to manage. just do the thing

I want to become an agent development grandmaster this weekend. Building actual agents to automate realistic workflows with production stakes attached. What papers do I have to read?

Here's the easiest way you can focus on outcomes over outputs: Watch People Work. you'll spot so many things to improve, it may shock you swizec.com/blog/watch-p...

11 years of San Francisco beat the tech bro out of me You can’t live here without raising how the world works

Never trust a programmer who won't hold the pagerduty for code they write.

Talked to a friend last night and we got a strong theory why leadership types love vibe coding: CEOs, managers, PMs, leads, etc have the agency to re-define their spec. AI gets 80% there? Okay great that's good enough! Change what you want on a whim.

I haven’t done a single workout in a week except walk a few blocks on crutches and I feel like an absolute potate. Brain foggy, mood grumpy, everyone’s annoying. How do people live like this??

saying your product has AI is like saying it’s built with Django or NextJS nobody cares. what can I do that I couldn’t do yesterday?

One thing they don't warn you about living in San Francisco is that every 2 or 3 years you get a huge "OMG THIS TECH CHANGES EVERYTHING" wave it's exhausting

Knee surgery went well. Sounds like I might be back to normal in a week or so 🤘 was worried about the 6 weeks of crutches option

Trying a new experiment: At the beginning of a project (to automate a task), every engineer spends one hour doing the job. then they keep doing this every week project is done when your grumpy engineers don’t hate doing the work

Great read. Gets at the heart of why I don’t use LLMs for writing but I do for coding ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

Turns out building an app is easier the 2nd time. Who knew

my favorite is listening to a room full of engineers talking about how to get their agents to write good code and I'm thinking "Ahh you sound just like all those papers people wrote in the 80's and 90's about big system architecture" nature is healing

TIL a heavy leg press can really mess you up See that dark area? That’s a bone bruise. And that missing bit in front is a piece of cartilage that sheared clean off. 6mm by 16mm only question is what kind of surgery

Litmus test for AGI: it's not agi until the provider accepts liability for its actions

I’ve been trying a new interview format that asks candidates to implement a smol realistic task. Full access to AI, internet, everything. At this point I’m convinced that just reading API docs puts you in the top 10% of software engineers

I don't know who needs to hear this but most AI maximalists make money when you buy more tokens. They don't care about outcomes. They just want you to buy and produce tokens. Volume wins

sundays are so fuckin long without running 😩 what do people do all day

So one of my core design principles is to turn config into data. Let stakeholders manage their stuff, write my code to be flexible. But lately I've been using LLMs to copypasta a repetitive piece of code for new configs (celery schedule + python task) and it's ... fine??

if cursor agents could just git pull before doing their thing that would be nice. I'm trying to collaborate!

I think if your only-value add is writing code, you've become unhireable. But the market for great engineers is the hottest I've ever seen. Focus on business outcomes, building great products, and treat code as an unfortunate necessity.

is there a polymarket for Github reaching zero nines?

Honestly really liking interviews with AI allowed. Lets you probe for understanding of concepts over syntax. Oh you know ActiveRecord but not SQLA? that's okay AI can translate, let's go

Yesterday I told a candidate "Using AI in our coding interview is encouraged" and his eyes sparkled. That was cool to see so figured I'd write about how we interview expecting that you'll use every tool you can get swizec.com/blog/softwar...

how do I teach people to use Frustration Driven Development?

A new chapter for open science 🧬 Plasmidsaurus is excited to announce a four-year strategic partnership with @addgene.bsky.social Open science runs on verified materials. Learn more: plasmidsaurus.com/news/a-new-c...

What happens when the model providers hold your code hostage? How many business leaders are thinking about this risk yet?

Halfway through the "Scaling Fastbook: software Engineering Through the Hockeystick" book by @swizec.com . Great read, full of timeless advice that will still be relevant a long time after the AI hysteria will have cooled down.