Joy & Curiosity #71

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Do you have to know every line of code your agent writes?

No one actually says that, that you have to know every line, of course, but there is a spectrum of opinions and experiences that ranges from never looking at the code to reviewing everything the agent writes. It’s interesting to consider where to put oneself on that spectrum.

Most of the time, when I work with Amp, I know in advance (a) what I want the resulting code to do and (b) how I will test that it does exactly that.

Once Amp declares it’s done writing code, I test. And what I mean is that I “test”, in every possible meaning of the word. The goal is to make sure the code actually does what it’s supposed to do. That can mean: asking Amp to run the unit tests, asking it to manually test in a browser, asking it to run a command, or check the data in the database, run the curl. With every tool I have — Amp, code, my hands and eyes — I test the happy path, the teary path, the edge cases. I make sure to test with existing data, no data, real data, fake data. I think about what might be different in production and how I could test that. Sometimes I ask Amp itself how I can manually verify what it just did and ask it to walk me through the testing.

How exactly I test very much depends on what I’m testing. Not all functionality and code have the same blast radius. Some sit at the heart of a system, some are peripheral. Adjust accordingly.

But once I’ve tested something and compared how it works with my mental model of how it’s supposed to work, then the code, I find, becomes less important.

Yes, I’ll do spot-checks to make sure it isn’t completely insane (less and less of a problem with these new models). I also go through my mental list of always-check-these things like (a) where and how is the data stored (b) will this box us in and prevent future changes (c) security (d) does it touch functionality I hadn’t considered. Sometimes that can take a while, other times there’s barely anything to do.

But do I know every line of code? Not if I don’t have to.

• “Is GitHub dead?” Tried my hand at short-form video content and so far the responses have been lovely, which is very dangerous because of course do I love to pull out my phone, talk for four minutes, and blast it into the Internet. More coming.

• Quinn and I recorded a new episode of Raising An Agent, many months after the last one. The agent’s now all grown-up and, hey, “the assistant’s dead, long live the factory.”

• If you can understand German, this might also be something for you: the lovely Tommy Falkowski interviewed me in German and we talked about AI, research in German, startups, and what I recommend to junior engineers nowadays. Very, very pleasant conversation.

• This post made me wonder whether I shouldn’t introduce a Post of the Week category: Isometric NYC. The technology is interesting, the graphics are lovely, the writing is clear and great and humble and honest and true. I’m not going to quote anything here, because it would diminish everything else in the post. Go and read it and think about the fact that he didn’t write a single line of code and ask yourself whether it matters and then wonder what he used — which skills, what knowledge — to turn his idea into reality.

• Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, with another toll of the bell: “This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That’s not to say SWEs don’t have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.”

• Quite a few people have asked me about my thoughts on stevey’s Gas Town but the truth is: I don’t have many thoughts on it and those that I have are rather boring. Here’s one of them: it’s an interesting experiment and probably, maybe, something vaguely like this might become a non-experiment in the future. Another one: I honestly like the Mad Max feeling of it all, I like that someone is out there burning those tokens down, doing token alchemy. I can’t think of many other people who can describe the mayhem of Mad Max Token Alchemy better than stevey. Then, when the whole crypto stuff started happening around Gas Town I had another thought, but let me express that one here by describing the bodily reaction I had: I took off my glasses, closed my eyes, and pinched the top of my nose. Armin Ronacher described that part well: Agent Psychosis — Are We Going Insane?

• Maggie Appleton, as always thoughtful and thorough and deep, described the other part: Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale.

• What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like? Marc Brooker took a tweet with a question (“What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like?”) as a prompt and turned it into this post. It’s great.

• I’m addicted to being useful, says Sean Goedecke. “There’s a lot of discussion on the internet about what ought to motivate software engineers: money and power, producing real value, ushering in the AI machine god, and so on. But what actually does motivate software engineers is often more of an internal compulsion. If you’re in that category - as I suspect most of us are - then it’s worth figuring out how you can harness that compulsion most effectively.” Or, as Jerry Seinfeld said on Howard Stern: “Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with.”

• Ben Thompson on AI and the Human Condition: “In fact, I have great optimism that one potential upside of AI is a renewed appreciation of and investment in beauty. One of the great tragedies of the industrial era — particularly today — is that beauty in our built environment is nowhere to be found. How is it that we built intricate cathedrals hundreds of years ago, and forgettable cookie-cutter crap today? That is, in fact, another labor story: before the industrial revolution labor was abundant and cheap, which meant it was defensible to devote thousands of person-years into intricate buildings; once labor was made more productive, and thus more valuable, it simply wasn’t financially viable to divert so much talent for so much time. Perhaps it follows, then, that the devaluing of labor Patel and Trammell warn about actually frees humans up to once again create beauty? Yes, robots could do it too, but I think humans will value the work of other humans more. Indeed, I think this is coming sooner than you might think: I expect the widespread availability of high quality AI art to actually make human art more desirable and valuable, precisely because of its provenance.”

• Pure coincidence, but here’s another Ben Thompson piece that I really enjoyed this week: an interview with Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines. Last year I flew quite a bit and the majority of those flights was with United and this interview made a lot of stuff click for me. One time my flight from SFO to FRA was delayed because the plane had some issue. The pilot announced that after we had already boarded and — I swear this is true — a minute after he made his announcement I got a push notification about why we need to deboard. Then I walked back into the airport and got another push notification, telling me that the new plane will be at gate so-and-so in two hours and — again: I swear — that plane was at that gate at exactly that time. It confirmed something that I’ve been ranting about for years after commuting by train for a while in Germany: there’s a delay and then there’s a delay with communication, they feel completely different. All of that is to say: I found that interview fascinating. And this quote stood out: “From my point of view, to your point about facing some structural disadvantages relative to other airlines, you overcame that from my perspective with technology, and the great thing about that is it benefits everyone. Even the basic economy flyer gets to use the United App and website, maybe not the refund part of it, but then by extension, that gives you the cost structure to be able to offer me better wine. That’s pretty inspiring.” Obvious when put like that, but it’s true, isn’t it? Everybody gets the same app and the same notifications because it’s all the same to United. Reminds me of Warhol on Coca Cola.

• And here is Adam Mastroianni with even more optimism: text is king. Great piece.

• “Some developers underestimate AI. They think their job is safe because AI makes mistakes. They’re wrong. AI is already good enough to handle a huge portion of routine coding work. But some AI enthusiasts overestimate the transformation. They think the human in the loop is a temporary limitation, a bottleneck to be optimized away. I think they’re wrong too. The human in the loop isn’t a limitation. It’s the point.” Written by Matteo Collina.

• Steve Ruiz, founder and CEO of tldraw, with thoughts on AI and open source and why they shut down external contributions to tldraw: stay away from my trash! It’s very thoughtful and interesting (I haven’t looked at open source contributions in a year and have no clue what it’s like to be in the war zone) and I think what he writes here rhymes with my “Is GitHub dead?” video from above: “The question is more fundamental. In a world of AI coding assistants, is code from external contributors actually valuable at all? If writing the code is the easy part, why would I want someone else to write it? […] But if you ask me, the bigger threat to GitHub’s model comes from the rapid devaluation of someone else’s code. When code was hard to write and low-effort work was easy to identify, it was worth the cost to review the good stuff. If code is easy to write and bad work is virtually indistinguishable from good, then the value of external contribution is probably less than zero.”

• “The duel is on. Colossus 2’s blue water footprint is around 346 million gallons per year, while an average In-N-Out store (yes, burgers only) comes in at around 147 million gallons. That’s roughly a ~2.5 : 1 ratio. We’ll let the reader decide what to make of [the] important information that one the largest datacenters in the world only consumes as much water as 2.5 In-N-Out’s.”

• Ryan Holiday writing about Stefan Zweig’s biography of Montaigne made me want to take a vacation in which I only read.

• And Derek Sivers makes me want to fly to Kolkata and listen to Ulysses.

• I’ve always been a fan of standup meetings, if done well. We currently don’t have one, but if I were to run one today, I’d send this piece by Marc G Gauthier to everyone on the team: the way I run standup meetings.

• Not sure how much of this is over-interpretation of a quip, but it sounds like Google’s loosening its stance on degrees being a requirement.

• “I left FAANG for a startup and regretted it.” Rare honesty.

• Did you know that there are tiny, ultra-thin, super-light, magnetic e-readers that you can pop on the back of your phone? I didn’t! Apparently what sounds like amazing fiction is a real thing: Xteink X4. My birthday’s coming up and discovering this broke my usual “I don’t really need anything” stance. This, I need.

• David Crawshaw on something neat they do at exe.dev to make it possible for you to type “ssh undefined-behavior.exe.xyz” and get routed to the right machine: SSH has no Host header.

• If that made you go “whoa, right, SSH, huh, I don’t think too much about it, do I” then please read this: Why Does SSH Send 100 Packets Per Keystroke? Excuse the language and, yes, I know, security, but fuck me: “In 2023, ssh added keystroke timing obfuscation. The idea is that the speed at which you type different letters betrays some information about which letters you’re typing. So ssh sends lots of ‘chaff’ packets along with your keystrokes to make it hard for an attacker to determine when you’re actually entering keys.”

• “The same slowness of reaction was apparent at scientific meetings. Many a time, a visiting young physicist (most physicists visiting Copenhagen were young) would deliver a brilliant talk about his recent calculations on some intricate problem of the quantum theory. Everybody in the audience would understand the argument quite clearly, but Bohr wouldn’t. So everybody would start to explain to Bohr the simple point he had missed, and in the resulting turmoil everybody would stop understanding anything. Finally, after a considerable period of time, Bohr would begin to understand, and it would turn out that what he understood about the problem presented by the visitor was quite different from what the visitor meant, and was correct, while the visitor’s interpretation was wrong.”

• Bugs Apple Loves: “Why else would they keep them around for so long?” The AirDrop one? Oooh boy. Interesting list though, because, in a way, these are classic Apple bugs. Bugs that only show up this way in Apple software and that only stay unfixed like this in Apple software.

• It’s from 2023 and, at least on the surface, analyses and judges Musk’s takeover of Twitter, but the more interesting thing to me is how it uses Max Weber to construct this lens of prophet vs. priest with which to look at business leaders: “Prophets look to found religions, or radically reform them, root and branch. […] Prophets inspire cults – groups of zealous followers who commit themselves, body and soul to the cause. Prophets who are good, lucky, or both can reshape the world. […] The problem with prophecy is that ecstatic cults don’t scale. If you want your divine revelation to do more than rage through the population like a rapid viral contagion and die out just as quickly, you need all the dull stuff. Organization. Rules. […] Religion becomes a matter not for prophets, but priests – specialized administrators of the divine, who are less about ripping up rule books than writing and enforcing them. Prophets unsurprisingly, hate this transformation into mundanity.” Don’t miss the comments!

• EU Inc. Hell yes. Now we just need those words to turn into actions.

• Heavy Is the Crown: George R.R. Martin on His Triumphs and Torments. Many times over the years have I thought that George R. R. Martin now has one of the worst jobs in the world. Yes, his books have made him rich; yes, they turned into one of the biggest and most successful television shows of all time, but good god, the expectations! It’s been years since he published the last book in the series. 15 years! Fans are waiting for how he will finish it and whether and how he will make up for the disappointing finale of the tv show. 15 years, man! 15 years of sitting down in front of your computer running MS DOS, trying to write, knowing that millions of people around the world will read and judge every word you put out. I already have a weird thing with expectations and thinking about George R. R. Martin and the expectations he has to meet makes me think that he lives in writer hell.

• “Here’s a simple test you can apply to any software system you work on:

  Imagine deleting the entire implementation. Not refactoring it. Not archiving it. Not putting it behind a feature flag. Deleting it. If that thought makes your stomach drop, pay attention. That reaction is telling you something important.” That’s Chad Fowler in The Deletion Test.

• Netzbremse: “Deutsche Telekom is throttling the internet.” I had no clue. I’ve been a customer of Deutsche Telekom for many years and had absolutely zero clue that this was going on, but then this week I had some very peculiar performance issues when talking to something on Cloudflare. 50% packet loss, latency of over a second. What’s going on? Did I misconfigure something? Did Cloudflare? Turns out that it’s Deutsche Telekom, who essentially says to Cloudflare “you have to pay, otherwise it’s slow” and Cloudflare refuses to play along.

• “All of this folds back into a larger point. When attention is fragmented and speed becomes the dominant value, media rearranges itself around that reality. Not because anyone wakes up wanting to mislead people, but because the context makes some paths survivable and others impossible. […] This goes back to my original premise that when velocity becomes the defining metric, authority is displaced. You don’t need to be right; you need to be first in the feed. Generalize this beyond YouTube tech reviews and you see the same pattern everywhere. I’m flabbergasted by how much good journalism goes unnoticed every day.”

• Easily one of the greatest programming tweets of the last ten years.

• You know those breathing exercises to calm you down? Breathe in for four seconds, hold breath for five, breathe out for seven. There’s around fifteen variations of it and if you believe the Internet then the Navy SEALs use exercises like that to stay calm in combat situations. I’m here to tell you that I found an alternative.