Joy & Curiosity #39

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

122 hours in San Francisco. 122 inspiring, blue sky, light jacket in the morning, SaaS billboards everywhere, in the office at 6:30am, full of software hours; hours that felt like the future of programming; hours that found their end yesterday, after an additional 11 of them and 10 minutes on a plane.

The list of interesting & joyful things below is a short one this time, since the majority of interesting & joyful things last week showed up in conversations with many wonderful people and only one of those conversations I will be able to link to.

To make up for it, here are some of the minutes and seconds of the 122 hours in San Francisco:

• At the very first place we sat down after arriving in San Francisco, I look up and say, “wait, isn’t that Jarred Sumner from Bun?” I send Jarred a message — “Did I just see you at the Ferry Building in SF?” — and get back a “yes”. “That’s SF for you,” says my friend.

• On Thursday we had lunch at the Google office in SF and I couldn’t stop thinking that it’s exactly how I imagined it to be. Electric scooters to get around inside, a dessert station at which you can get cookies & marshmallows (“I need to have a Google cookie, come on, I just have to”), the Android keyboard to sign-in with your full legal name, someone putting two extra lunches in to-go boxes, everything and everyone looking like a TV commercial, an amazing view, and so many people.

• We recorded a podcast with a professional setup and, wow, lighting is incredible.

• “My parents gifted me your books when I was 18”

• Coffee with Mary, coffee with Wilhelm, coffee with Ellie, coffee with Indigo — conversations about software, the future of software, and old things no one cares about anymore. “It’s so nice to talk about this. It feels like a big puzzle and everyone I talk to has a different piece in their head.”

• Walked to the AI builders meetup at PlanetScale office and, standing at a traffic light, talked about GitHub and its acquisition by Microsoft, and stock options and all that, and a guy next to us turns and goes: “You guys work for Sourcegraph? Here’s some swag.” Software is everywhere in SF.

• “So many SaaS billboards”

• Mind the selection bias, but multiple people I had coffee with told me that, after a decade of intense love, they no longer care about which editor they use — “the agent writes most of the code.”

• Checked off another fast food box: Chipotle. Intense & very good.

• They have Peanut Butter Pretzels in the US. An incredible — and joyful — surprise in times of unprecedented globalism — how has something that should’ve earned its inventor a monument or ten stayed hidden from me for so long?

• Imagine you walk into your dentist’s waiting room and it now has a fridge, and fruit, and peanuts and pretzels — the picture you have in mind is Air China lounge at SFO.

• "You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat." "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!" "Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

• Beautiful: “I figured I better fess up and tell Steve Jobs what I’d done, so I sent him an email”

• “But I don't want more suggestions! I don't need more code thrown at me. I want a small number of high-value episodes of assistance as if a professional developer was sitting beside me.” — Where are the proactive AI coding tools?

• Nobody Codes Here Anymore: “I asked our CFO and he said he’d be happy to spend $100/dev/month on agents. To get 20% more productive that’s a bargain.” A friend wrote to me that they’re going to spend $200/month to get better at using agents. If someone had told me they’re going to try a dev tool for $200/month two years ago, my reaction certainly would’ve been different from the one it is today. Times are changing. (To spell out the obvious: use ampcode.com and join the Discord and I’m happy to talk to you about how to get a lot out of it.)

• Conrad is thinking about whether “to garbage collect or not?” and briefly touches on something that I’ve been wondering about: what languages will LLMs be good at? All of them, or is there something fundamental that stops them from being good at, say, Rust & its borrow checker?

• Talking about Rust: “In an attempt to build resilient software I decided to vendor my packages, a cargo feature that downloads all my dependencies so I can host them locally. Out of curiosity I ran toeki a tool for counting lines of code, and found a staggering 3.6 million lines of rust. Removing the vendored packages reduces this to 11136 lines of rust. Now I understand that webservers are complex, and a full asyncronous runtime is even more complex. However the entire linux kernel is 27.8 million lines […]”

• I think this is a great suggestion, but you need to read the post, not just the headline, friends: write the most clever code you can write.

• “Often, your best opportunity to do this will come when you see the candidate do something interesting. ‘How curious!’ you’ll think to yourself, ‘Why did they do it that way?’ But here’s the important part: I need you to not say those words out loud.” Gave me cold sweat flashbacks of an interview in which someone kept asking me “why?”

• Ted Unangst on branchless development: “The solution is to bring all the code together as early and often as possible. The error bound for our estimate of the combined effect of two changes is proportional to the magnitude of each change. A series of small changes means our baseline is constantly readjusting, leading to fewer surprises. It certainly sounds like forcing everyone to play in the same sandbox will slow things down. And it does. But it also speeds things up.“ This is something I’ve come to strongly believe in over the years. If you need to have branches, keep them as small as possible. Merge constantly, effectively turning it branchless. It’s very weird to explain to someone who’s never done this, but if someone said to me “no branch should live longer than a day” I would say that’s exactly right.