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🔗 Every Layer of Review Makes You 10x Slower, apenwarr
I think we’re going to be stuck with these systems pipeline problems for a long time. Review pipelines — layers of QA — don’t work. Instead, they make you slower while hiding root causes. Hiding causes makes them harder to fix. But, the call of AI coding is strong. That first, fast step in the pipeline is so fast! It really does feel like having super powers. I want more super powers. What are we going to do about it? Maybe we finally have a compelling enough excuse to fix the 20 years of problems hidden by code review culture, and replace it with a real culture of quality. I think the optimists have half of the right idea. Reducing review stages, even to an uncomfortable degree, is going to be needed. But you can’t just reduce review stages without something to replace them. That way lies the Ford Pinto or any recent Boeing aircraft. The complete package, the table flip, was what Deming brought to manufacturing. You can’t half-adopt a “total quality” system. You need to eliminate the reviews and obsolete them, in one step.
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A last minute change to the line-up for EdinburghJS tonight. Sara’s talk on emulators has been moved to June, and instead we will have a few lightning talks (CSS, Playwright and more).
Still at half six at the Perk offices. Tickets at: luma.com/edinburgh…
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🔗 The Chronology Problem, Jim Olds
But there’s a subtler cost, too. When we don’t understand how a technology or a scientific field evolved, we become poor navigators. We don’t know which roads were tried and abandoned and why. We don’t know which detours led to unexpected places. We can’t reason well about where to push next, because we don’t have an accurate map of where we’ve already been.
Technological and scientific genealogy isn’t nostalgia. It’s a form of rigor. The rat in the 1975 experiment knew something. So did the Caltech scientist, looking at the brain recordings. Arrhenius knew something in 1896. Bachelier knew something in 1900. Rosenblatt’s perceptron knew something in 1958. We could stand to know it, too.
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🔗 Agentic Swarms Are an Org-Chart Delusion, JA Westenberg
The boundaries between “marketer” and “developer” and “analyst” dissolve, because those boundaries were never real boundaries in the work itself. They were boundaries in human capacity. The people who will thrive aren’t “agent managers.” They’re people who can say what they want and evaluate whether they got it - and whether what they got was either good or shit.
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🔗 Tacit Knowledge and the SaaSpocalypse, Chris Walker
The difference is one of proportion: when AI handles the commodity work, tacit-knowledge-intensive problems go from being 20 percent of someone’s day to being 80 percent of it.
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Just finished The Running Ground by Nick Thompson, a memoir and reflection on aging, relationships and endurance. Inspirational! 📚
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Anthropic suggests how AI coding impacts developer learning. Takeaway: use AI to learn as you go; favour inquiry over generation. Exercise your brain!
In an AI-augmented workplace, productivity gains matter, but so does the long-term development of the expertise those gains depend on.
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Interesting technique from Vercel on providing context via a compress docs index in Agents.md vs providing a skill to look up the same.
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🔗 Why Talking to LLMs Has Improved My Thinking, Philip O’Toole
the model is not improving my thinking directly. It is improving the interface between my thinking and language. Since reasoning depends heavily on what one can represent explicitly, that improvement can feel like a real increase in clarity.
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🔗 The Human in the Loop, Adventures in Nodeland
When I ship code, my name is on it. When there’s a security vulnerability […], it’s my responsibility. I can use AI to help me move faster, but I cannot outsource my judgment. I cannot outsource my accountability.
Responsibility is key. Using AI has made me more paranoid about merging code - I don’t want the embarrassment of having yolo’d something into production without having understood what has been written. Part of the solution to this is likely to write better tests and validations and be responsible for those instead.
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Just finished On the Calculation of Volume III, Solvej Balle 📚
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Just aded a “Previous Bulletins” section to the Scottish Technology Club homepage, plus a link to the archive.
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🔗 Why Self-Improvement Starts With Maintenance, Tim Harford
Maintenance is meditative — one of Brand’s heroes, the great French philosopher/round-the-world-sailor Bernard Moitessier, told him “My rule is, a new boat every day.” By that he meant that everything on his one-man boat should be as good as new; no repair job was so trivial that it could be postponed.
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Started reading: Human Acts by Kang Han 📚
