Paris!

If it hadn’t been for people like Semmelweis daring to think beyond the limitations set for them, instead of modern medicine we may have decided to go all in on putting more leeches on faster. This feels relevant for some reason…

People claim they get 10x productivity boosts with AI coding tools. After my recent experiments with Claude Code, I'm starting to think we're not using these tools the same way. Or that they’re just lying. Or both. 1/

Philosophy is being told you don’t know anything about philosophy because the person telling you has read a different book than you, but perservering anyway.

AI hype as the reversal of the Enlightment. Essay underway.

Hegel and Heidegger and Agile and OOP and now LLM’s and there’s suddenly so much bullshit in the world it feels like Sisyphus should have been given a research project instead of a rock.

I am the baddies.

Getting in the mood for Antwerp

Title caught me and I didnt get disappointed! #architecture @ndcconferences.com www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8ZO...

Still in utter shock because a philosopher said something nice about my book.

You won’t be replaced by residuality theory, you’ll be replaced by someone using residuality theory. Hur dur.

Join Barry O'Reilly's 2-day, hands-on #workshop "Advanced Software Architecture with Residuality Theory" at #NDCOslo! ndcoslo.com/workshops/ad...

Since we in tech love abstraction so much why not merge AI and tech marketing and tech sales so that all hallucinating can be done in one place.

It’s been a few months six Ethel release of ”The Architects Paradox”. I’ve just read a glowing review of the book on LinkedIn. This is first time I’ve stepped and thought about it, but that book was a lot. The reading list for it was INSANE. What was I thinking? I still haven’t really recovered.

Newsletter: I am sick and god damn tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing. The media is complicit in accepting fantastical nonsense - both in the numbers put out by OpenAI and the silly jobs created by Anthropic - and it has to stop. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

Crikey. Still going.

Why is a cat grumpy? She bit me and beat up her sister. Lots of tail swishing. What is this?

Just done a quiz to find out what kind of potato I am. That’s enough weekend for me.

How can people be so stupid as to not know what tariffs will do to the economy they ask as if we haven’t been pretending that statistics become conscious at scale for the last two years.

I’ve had a bit of a breather from philosophy since I released the book and have been slowly making my way through Nietzsche’s works just for fun with no pressure. Now I’ve gone down a rabbit hole again and have some new ideas which means even more reading. I might add this as new walks to the book.

There always a bunch of people tech who say things like “you’re not a real programmer if you don’t know this language/construct etc” Long experience in the business teaches you that they are dickheads. When philosophers do this it’s the same thing, but at least the tech dickhead can build something.

Nietzsche is the Sonic Youth of philosophers. It’s mostly noise and screeching but you’ll find a few decent melodies and you want to believe because the idea is soooo cool so you put yourself through it and you come to like it but in your 30’s you listen back for nostalgia and think WTF was that…

Emerging from that little philosophy phase and now multivariate calculus and fluid dynamics. Rabbit holes galore!

Residues is soaring back up the charts as it becomes recommended reading in Brussels.

Maybe I should rewrite Residues for folks who aren’t software developers, like for instance if you were running a large integration of countries and markets across a continent and had trouble figuring out what was a priority.

So many people posting on SM ”I asked this LLM to analyze the political situation” and why do I have to live on the same planet as them?

Twitter is like that planet destroying weapon on the Death Star, but its energy source is stupidity and when harnessed can destroy countries. The left is mad because the right figured out how to use it at scale first. Europe needs to switch it off or be destroyed by American culture war crossfire.

What did I get done this week? I’m 150 years old for god’s sake…

Me: ah holidays! Time to relax Brain: what if this new thought was a book?

Residuality!

Everyone who lives in my house is like a little squirrel but instead of hoarding nuts for the winter they hoard phone chargers in their rooms and no one can ever remember where they buried them.

I am the tiredest.

Currently designing a system. Then I’m going to feed it to an LLM and ask the LLM to design the architecture. Get the same result. Write article about AI replacing architects. Get clicks.

Well into the third week at #1.

I think the book buying public have remarkable taste of late.

I may have miscalculated. I assumed that because Residues was the pragmatic how-to-get-it-done and The Architect’s Paradox was the nerdy back story that The Architect’s Paradox wouldn’t be as popular. Turns out everyone likes the nerdy stuff!

The US constitution is the solid architecture that means that the actual implementation can be complete lunatics and it will keep running. This is a good way to think about software architecture and AI coding assistants.

One measure of success is the number of desperate old men emailing you to say “You’re not allowed to think like that”.

#1 Bundle, #1 Book, and #5 book in todays LeanPub charts.

Authors, if you see this, it's a sign to post the first line of your book. “This book was an accident.”

And so work begins on the third book. This time the focus is on the technical aspects of software architecture, bringing the journey through philosophy, then through complexity science, finally to the algorithm, reconnecting architecture with computer science which it long ago drifted away from.

Ok. Blank page. New book.

#2 and #7!

Out now: leanpub.com/architectspa...

Going to change the book title to “This Damn Book”.

"Teaching of philosophy ... tends to implant in philosophers an intimidatingly nit-picking superego, a blend of their most impressive teachers and their most competitive colleagues, which guides their writing by means of constant anticipations of guilt and shame." Bernard Williams

Don’t mean to boast but I’m traveling tomorrow and already remembered to pack travel adapters.

When you ask real philosophers to review the book and expect them to critique your contrarian philosophical takes but instead they report back that they don’t trust their software people anymore after reading it…

Maybe when you have a huge software failure the answer isn’t ”How we could build this better” but instead ”We should have used people instead of code” but this has NOT occurred to anyone in the last 30 years. The best we can up with is autogenerated code based on the shit that failed already.