ruraljuror

No days off for the agents.

He talks about TI-83 programming in the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast interview.

Right! I am very open about the sleep challenges I face with my children, but I also believe that the problem is due to lack of a rigid schedule. Routine is key not only for sleep, but general development. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to get on the same page with my spouse about this.

Cry? Scream? Many kids can climb out of cribs earlier than 24m.

kept trying to design a contraption I could wear on my shoulders that worked like a laptop desk

Nathan Fielder wears something like this in The Rehearsal. Google tells me it is called Connect-A-Desk.

Of course git is great!

Check out Mitchell Hashimoto’s podcast episode on the pragmatic engineer. He starts talking about AI at 1:16:41. At some point after that he discusses git specifically, and how in some cases it becomes impossible to push because the local branch is always out of date.

+1. If we’re at an early stage in the agentic curve where we think reading commit messages is going to matter, I don’t want those cluttered with meaningless boilerplate (“co-authored by my tools!”).

But at this point i am more curious if git will continue to be the best tool.

Hm, no, in F1 they don’t have the same car. Each season, each team builds their own (adhering to the Formula) and put massive amounts of efforts to gaining efficiency through engineering.

Link to Friedman's piece on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/trump-tariffs-chi...

Also he talks about this on The Ezra Klein Show.

Sorry to cause fatigue.

The US government absolutely does not do what China does in this case. But the reason for my paranthesis and question mark was that I was not sure what call it.

Good point about the supply chain; and it seems like most responses mistakenly disagree with you.

Thomas Friedman talks about this after his most recent visit to China. Where China excels is through rapid supply chain development by fierce regional competition among several (state-supported/sponsored/seeded?) competitors.

Is that what happened? In Nexus, Harari looks at this exact same situation: the invention of the printing press, and shows how clergy used it to stoke witch hunts (ahem, misinformation) for decades--if not centuries. It was not for hundreds of years until after the invention of the printing press that we had The Enlightenment. What gave rise to The Enlightenment? Harari argues it is modern institutions.

It's not so simple that we can say "printing press good, nobody speak ill of the printing press."

I think they meant the result— not the content—would be the same.

The book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann covers exactly the topics you are asking about and references many blog posts.

https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code is a great find from that list. Thanks!

Woah, what an unexpected surprise!

Yeah how would you know?

j/k Love ghostty!

I frequently manage to do this writing bash scripts.

I have a bad habit of not fully drying my hands when retrieving pods. The pods all clump together if they get wet. This is one of the many reasons I prefer powder.

Software developers don’t arrive fully formed. Rob Pike benefitted from reading a book or two.

If you confine agency to something only humans can have, which is “human agency,” then yes of course LLMs don’t have it. But there is a large body of philosophical work studying non-human agency, and it is from this characteristic of agency that LLM agents take their name. Hariri argues that LLMs are the first technology that are agents. I think saying that they “can’t do things” and are not agents misunderstands them and underestimates their potential.

I agree with your larger point, but I don't understand what you mean the LLM doesn’t do anything? LLMs do do things and they can absolutely have agency (hence all the agents being released by AI companies).

I don’t think this agency absolves companies of any responsibility.

Where? In the U.S.? Whenever I have paid for gas with cash or from the cashier, I pay for it in advance, “Give me $10 of regular unleaded!”

Looks right to me. Are you referring to the capitalization?

The other half of the title is significant; it puts the article into the context of criticizing business leaders for how they think about AI given its current capabilities, which is what you suggested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)

This is not my idea. Yuval Noah Harari discusses it in Nexus. Gemini (partially) summarizes it like this:

  Harari argues that AI is fundamentally different from previous technologies. It's not just a tool that follows instructions, but an "agent" capable of learning, making decisions, and even generating new ideas independently.

Yes, AI does seem different and pretty serious. Please keep in mind the thread I was responding to said we should think of AI as we would a hammer. We can think of AI like a tool, but limiting our conception like that basically omits what is interesting and concerning (even in the context of the original blog post).

I didn't mean to imply AI was sentient or approaching sentience. Agency seems to be the key distinction between it and other technologies. You can have agency, apparently, without the traits you claim I imply.

You missed half of the title.

Okay, so write an article about how the hammer companies are dumb

This is exactly how I interpreted the OP blog post: it is a great example of how companies are (mis)using AI given it's current abilities.

AI can be used as a tool, sure, but it is distinct from other technologies in that it is an agent, that is: it has or operates with agency.

There are many prominent people out there who are saying that AI will replace SWEs--not just saying that AI will be a tool added to th SWE tool belt.

Although it seems like you agree with the conclusion of the article you are criticizing, the context is much more complex than AI is a tool like a hammer.