17 posts. See all tags.
— part 5 of The question CTOs are probably not asking: is our loop closed?
Everybody was told agents only write code. They also read, and reason about what they read, and for a product owner that changes the job: feasibility with the code cited, a prototype that costs what a drawing did, and what an organisation has to assemble — training, access, an environment, a budget nobody has to justify — before the loop before the loop can close.
— part 4 of The question CTOs are probably not asking: is our loop closed?
A product owner who wanted to know whether their idea was even possible had one way to find out: interrupt somebody who was building something already decided. What that did to their work, why the two-line ticket was never laziness, and why the oldest fight in our industry was never about personalities.
— part 3 of The question CTOs are probably not asking: is our loop closed?
Around the loop a second time, and this time built for real: the two documents the spec turns out to be, the inner loop the agent runs alone while nobody watches, the checkpoint that is one command, the second read a machine does first, a merge nobody attends a meeting for, and the letters going back to the desk.
— part 1 of Rust Beyond Systems Programming
I learned Rust by building a bank in it, having never written a line of it before, while the corridor explained that Rust needs PhD-level programmers. What actually changed was not safety. It was relief: I stopped spending my day avoiding mistakes and got to spend it solving the problem.
— part 2 of The question CTOs are probably not asking: is our loop closed?
Four rules for the moment an agent takes the writer’s chair: why you do not get to wait this one out, why a team that waits for a nod is not using agents, the one sentence about control that this series hangs on, and what happens to every estimate you have ever given.
— part 1 of The question CTOs are probably not asking: is our loop closed?
Every trade has a loop between “it is written” and “it is right”. Ours too. We drew it, built half of it, and a person quietly did the rest. What that cost, and how I know. Spoiler: I was the person.
Cognition published a case study about EBANX and Devin, and I am most of the way through it. The number everyone will take away is twelve hours. This is about the month before them and the bet around them, which is the part a case study has no room for.
Thirteen commitments about working with AI, written down so that anyone who reads my code or my text knows the terms it was made under. The first of them is that this page was written by a machine, and that I answer for it.
— part 9 of You are now the whole team
Every mechanism this series has described, and the six things that beat them anyway — the wrong remedy for a right diagnosis, the machine that never complains, the gate that lied about itself, and the rule I was proudest of, whose hole an agent found and was entirely right about.
— part 8 of You are now the whole team
The architecture conversation that filled the twenty-six days: one reader-agnostic server, one bridge per screen reader in whatever language that reader dictates, and a decision to reject Rust for a reason I have never seen written down.
— part 7 of You are now the whole team
Twenty-six days between one commit on the terminal and the next, because every pull request cost me an evening of listening. What I built instead, and the four questions that separate this from procrastination.
— part 6 of You are now the whole team
What the method from last time actually produced, measured rather than asserted: where the hours went, how much had to be done twice, and the afternoon a machine that had never built any of this was ready in nine minutes.
— part 5 of You are now the whole team
What I actually typed on the first night, and why almost none of it was an instruction. Five moves, quoted from the record — including the ones where I told the agent I did not understand a word of what it had just proposed.
— part 4 of You are now the whole team
Five hundred and forty lines of documentation, six files, and not one line of code — then fourteen more commits before the first one. Six jobs got done that evening, and I did not notice I was switching between them.
— part 3 of You are now the whole team
Extrapolation is the whole reason you use an agent, and the whole risk of using one, because they are the same mechanism. So the question is never how to stop it — it is where it should be wide and where it must be narrow.
— part 2 of You are now the whole team
The thing I wanted for years and could not afford to build, what it sounds like when a terminal is navigable by heading, and why I still did not start by asking an agent to write it.
— part 1 of You are now the whole team
We were always the engineer and the bricklayer, because in software putting the walls up is itself an ultra-qualified job. Something else can lay the bricks now — which does not make you less of an engineer, it makes you only an engineer.