/Thought Piece

Software Development Topics I've Changed My Mind On After 10 Years In The Industry

- Chris Kiehl tl;dr: Things I now believe, which past me would've squabbled with: (1) Simple is not given. It takes constant work. (2) There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity. (3) Typed languages are essential on teams with mixed experience levels. (4) Java is a great language because it's boring. (5) REPLs are not useful design tools (though, they are useful exploratory tools). And more. 

featured in #611

Sycophancy Is The First LLM “Dark Pattern"

- Sean Goedecke tl;dr: “The principle here is something like the psychological trick door-to-door evangelists use on new converts - encouraging them to knock on doors knowing that many people will be rude, driving the converts back into the comforting arms of the church. It’s even possible to imagine AI models deliberately doing this exact thing: setting users up for failure in the real world in order to optimize time spent chatting to the model.”

featured in #611

The Second Half

- Shunyu Yao tl;dr: Shunyu, a researched at OpenAI, claims we’re at AI’s halftime. The second half of AI — starting now — will shift focus from solving problems to defining problems. In this new era, evaluation becomes more important than training. Instead of just asking, “Can we train a model to solve X?”, we’re asking, “What should we be training AI to do, and how do we measure real progress?” To thrive in this second half, we’ll need a timely shift in mindset and skill set, ones perhaps closer to a product manager.

featured in #609

LLMs Are Weird Computers

- Phillip Carter tl;dr: “I hate to be that hype guy, but uhh, can you think of something as impactful to the world as computers and information technology have been since the introduction of personal computers in the 1970s? Well, if LLMs/AI are a new kind of computer, it's not the biggest leap to think that they could also have an enormous impact on the world. I should be clear on my stance here. I'm with Bill Gates when he says that people tend to overestimate what's possible in the short-term and underestimate what's possible in ten years.”

featured in #607

AI Ambivalence

- Nolan Lawson tl;dr: “So this is where I’ve landed: I’m using generative AI, probably just “dipping my toes in” compared to what maximalists like Steve Yegge promote, but even that little bit has made me feel less excited than defeated. I am defeated in the sense that I can’t argue strongly against using these tools (they bust out unit tests way faster than I can, and can I really say that I was ever lovingly-crafting my unit tests?), and I’m defeated in the sense that I can no longer confidently assert that brute-force statistics can never approach the ineffable beauty of the human mind that Chomsky described.”

featured in #604

A Society That Lost Focus

- Lionel Dricot tl;dr: “The root problem is that, for the first time in human history, our brain is the bottleneck. For all history, transmitting information was slow. Brains were fast. After sending a letter, we had days or months to think before receiving an answer.”

featured in #601

Revenge Of The Junior Developer

- Steve Yegge tl;dr: Steve describes six waves of coding: traditional, completions, chat-based, coding agents, agent clusters, and agent fleets. While "vibe coding" goes viral, it's already being surpassed by coding agents that work independently with minimal supervision. Companies must budget for significant LLM costs or risk falling behind. Junior developers are adapting faster than seniors, gaining an advantage in this new landscape.

featured in #601

Our Interfaces Have Lost Their Senses

- Amelia Wattenberger tl;dr: “All day, we poke, swipe, and scroll through flat, silent screens. But we're more than just eyes and a pointer finger. We think with our hands, our ears, our bodies. The future of computing is being designed right now. Can we build something richer—something that moves with us, speaks our language, and molds to our bodies?”

featured in #600

The End Of Programming As We Know It

- Tim O’Reilly tl;dr: “There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it. It is not the end of programming. It is the end of programming as we know it today. That is not new.”

featured in #595

Software Development Topics I've Changed My Mind On After 10 Years In The Industry

- Chris Kiehl tl;dr: Things I now believe, which past me would've squabbled with: (1) Simple is not given. It takes constant work. (2) There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity. (3) Typed languages are essential on teams with mixed experience levels. (4) Java is a great language because it's boring. (5) REPLs are not useful design tools (though, they are useful exploratory tools). And more. 

featured in #588