Clint Hill

A lot of vindication received for me personally in the last few weeks. Unfortunately none of it feels good and certainly all of it isn’t worth the toil to get it.

As a Clint I can confirm a few of us in fact are very boring.

This feels close to solidproject.org

Given the environment lately - for a minute - I took this literally and searched for “AI farts”. Then I realized. LOL.

Man. What a time to be alive

Re-inventing wheels and shit. Amirite?

Higher level than Rust, lower level than Go.

That’s a great introduction. Having written both I completely understand your meaning.

Have I missed the “AI did/n’t help with my compiler” article?

I’m in an interesting spot in my professional journey. I work for a company going thru an “AI native” transformation but I’m also building my own thing that is barely AI adjacent. I’m in between 2 very diff worlds and one of those is increasingly more promising.

Any feed and tack store have horse stall mats. Cheap and effective. Ex-CrossFitter here to say don’t waste any money on named brand for this.

My team just speed ran 2yrs worth of work in about 9mos. I’m split-brained about it. On one side it’s remarkable achievement. On the other, I see how it can be done even faster/better.

Difference? Deciding which parts of software development requires preciousness. Fewer the better.

Plausible yet wrong. This phrase captures a lot.

“bro, I have a brain”

This is going to save us.

Delivering a company’s product, and refactor existing systems is complicated and has little to do with deadlines or tech debt. We revert to “more devs” and that’s more complexity. Instead? Ignore hype. Frequent small changes. Solve your problem not others. Don’t ask permission. Do this Everyday.

I’ve done this and … increased my font size in my editor. Both because my old age eyesight is worsening but also I’ve realized having “whole file visible” was decreasing my ability to focus on specifics of logic. Wasn’t expecting my focus to improve because there are fewer lines on screen.

Ironically this iteration of yarvin is what turned a family member around from the deep end. Their recent discovery of this led to this comment: “wow that’s lunacy” and a swift change to their perspective. I wish it didn’t require all the trouble and tragedy in some cases.

I’m increasingly confused that folks continue to believe that AI will build all sorts of software, and by folks with no dev experience. I mean - how will those folks know? How will they know AI has given them “software” that runs? Or is correct/scalable/testable/deployable? They’ll learn how?

GenAI for programmers == expensive auto complete.

I’m growing more convinced the biggest attractions for AI is its ability to “search” and its ability to create “integrations”. Both are table stakes in SaaS products today. Neither of these is innovative.

Content creation will become increasingly problematic and I suspect less interesting.

This is an incredible opening line to a short story.

In all the AI hype, an important awakening is happening related to data.

Just because you have it does not make it valuable.

Data in the right context, at the right time, for the right users is the value.

Everything else is parlor tricks.

In my recent experience profit is the metric that’s an aggregate of others, like lead time. Lead time usually improves when employees control it. Sometimes this gets confused as ill-concern for profit because it’s indirect. I’m still not great at expressing this to leadership.

Which line represents the “fire department”?

There is a point in time in which the software you’re writing needs to be less-than-perfect in order to scale and be manageable. No API or framework makes this better. Your scale is not my scale, and these things can’t be homogenized. Learn to recognize this moment and you’ll have more success.

I remember Doc Ozone (ozones.com). To this day I’m not sure I know who that is, but back then that site taught me more than all the books I read about JavaScript.

I’m convinced the best software engineers have one common skill. They learn to learn. In my 20+ years of writing code - this is the one skill that helped me the most.

The problem with this however is that it presents as “not knowing what you’re doing”. And that is used against you in interviews.

There is a stage in software startups where it feels like “we need more devs”. That is the moment good startups say no. Instead they move to find really talented devs who start and create a culture of quality. If you go the other way you’ll prolong quality and you’ll find most of the tech debt.

Yes certain types of code. But that’s not the zeitgeist right now. It’s more like “build your business software” or “improve the quality of your enterprise code”. And those are definitely not the “write once” type. I appreciate the nuance and wish it were more pervasive.

Like other crafts, continuous learning is a critical skill in software engineering. However it’s usually not a new “fundamental concept” but instead it’s someone else’s opinion about an existing concept. Frameworks and abstractions often force learning extra stuff that doesn’t port anywhere else.

Of all the concerns for using AI to build software the one that has the biggest impact is the potential to stifle learning the craft.

If we stop learning we’ll never understand when/where/how AI is failing us.

An idea we’ve had at work is to assess whether our tech debt is “contemporary”. Two things: contemporary tech debt is made from framework lock-in and the other is made from old domain context. The latter is more important to pay down but only if you avoid the former.

I’m convinced in a near future we’ll experience the backside of this AI hype cycle as a time where companies will say “we need humans to unwind our AI.” Forgetting that it’s the humans that made the AI.

But what do I know. Maybe computers will become sentient.

Keep learning, we’ll need it