@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com
Writing The Pragmatic Engineer (@pragmaticengineer.com), the #1 technology newsletter on Substack. Author of The Software Engineer's Guidebook (engguidebook.com). Formerly at Uber, Skype, Skyscanner. More at pragmaticengineer.com
Earlier this week we had our #ELC #Amsterdam event where we hosted @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com. Super interesting to have a deep conversation with him in a cosy setting with 200+ attendees! We dove straight into how AI is shaping software engineering and had a great time hearing his insights
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What does it mean for software engineering when we no longer write the code? Here's the take from Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code.
Watch or listen:
• YouTube: youtu.be/julbw1JuAz0
• Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2Bho9xC...
• Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...
Data from The Pragmatic Engineer shows that Cursor is on track to overtake GitHub Copilot in usage if they continue the growth they have.
Claude Code already did this - in just 8 months (!!), growing faster than anything before
More data: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-tooling...
As always, nothing is black and white; low reliablity is not necessarily because of shipping changes to prod (it can be infra strain etc)
But we can say that Anthropic's current reliability is embarrassingly low for any infra company, and they need to do better
On one end, the Anthropic team is a massive user of AI to write code (80%+ of all code deployed is written by Claude Code). They ship amazingly fast.
On the other hand, seeing these beyond terrible reliability numbers suggests there might be a downside to all this speed:
Yes it’s ironic that I have typos in my social media posts including the one above - I just type them out on the go without proper spellcheck, that’s why :)
Used to, but writing on a regular basis made it go away mostly. It’s now more “I don’t have much motivation/energy to write” at times, after writing plenty
I just type it out on my phone with no spellcheck for social media, yeah. And bsky doesn’t allow editing
Different to when I do longform and actually do editing!
Lots of people have asked me how Ingot good at writing longform articles / posts etc.
It’s not a definite answer, but from early childhood to now I’ve been an avid reader - of fiction (novels, sci-fi).
I still read fiction daily, and I suspect it has helped massively.
Another cool podcast by @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com talking to Mitchell Hashimoto talking about history of startups and cloud,@hashicorp.com, #OpenSource and #AI.
"The joke was, when AWS went down all the startups became more cashflow neutral and would lose less money"🤣
youtu.be/WjckELpzLOU?...
Microsoft and gaming simply do not mix.
Purchased Minecraft Legends on my Steamdeck. It requires a Microsoft account play (??). Fine.
After some days it kicked me out, and now every time I try to log in, Microsoft gives me an error. So I cannot play the game I paid for.
WTH
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Watch or listen:
• Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0bIu...
• Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m...
Brought to you by:
• Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. statsig.com/pragmatic
(cont'd)
How has the day-to-day workflow of Mitchell Hashimoto changed, thanks to AI tools? Mitchell is one of the most influential infra engineers of our time (created the likes of Terraform and Ghostty), and is one of the most pragmatic builders I’ve met.
YouTube: youtu.be/WjckELpzLOU (cont'd)
I now have the interesting case where my old school bank has notifications enabled - because they never abused it. Revolut has it off because they do.
So I’ll have a slight bias to pay with my bank card not my Revolut one.
Self-inflicted own goal by Revolut…
I don’t have notifications on for many apps: it’s only for the very few that never abuse them.
Some marketing or growth hacking person at Revolut has now achieved me turning off all Revolut notifications, after sending why I consider spam. Non actionable, just plain junk.
If you'd like to get a hype-free take on what's happening with AI in the tech industry, The Pragmatic Summit keynote by @lauratacho.com is a must-watch.
Recorded two weeks ago, made public for everyone today. It got SO much love at the event: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOHg...
My writeup of The Future of Software Development event, where this observation on XP came up: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-future...
A few things:
- Some parts of XP are just mainstream: CI/CD, short iterations (at most places)
- AI agents force/but also make it easier to do things like coding style documentation (if not done yet), tests, even TDD
- AI amplifies current practices, thus pushes towards good sw practices like XP!
Agree!! There is comfort seeing that long learned efficient practices are rediscovered again!
And yes, needless to say much of XP became mainstream at most places (eg CI, short iterations, coding styles etc)
We discussed how thanks to AI, all these practices seem more relevant and are naturally picking up (eg TDD etc) with ppl knowing nothing about XP
This is surely a rhetorical question. Testing is so important w agents / closing the loop. TDD also making a smaller comeback w agents as its now easier (and still v profitable) to do it
My source for this is btw it came up as we discussed it in detail at The Future of Software Development workshop organized by @martinfowler.com on the 25th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. My write up on this coming soon. Here’s a write up by Martin: martinfowler.com/fragments/20...
The first recording from The Pragmatic Summit is available to watch for anyone: How AI is Reshaping the Craft of Building Software. With Tibo Sottiaux (Head of Engineering, Codex, OpenAI) and Vijaye Raji (CTO of Applications, OpenAI)
A very good one. Watch it here:
youtu.be/Bo6Gtq3nMXc
Amusing - I'm hearing a comeback of XP (Extreme Programming) practice.
In the early 2000s these used to be popular (championed by @kentbeck.com). Then died down. They are now surging again.
XP practices like small releases, frequent integration, and constant customer input!
Full article: www.ft.com/content/00c2...
My two cents is: well, this proves AWS engineers are giving a Kiro an honest shot. My biggest surprise is that despite it being used for prod work, Kiro remains virtually unknown / unused outside AWS…
This headline today reads shocking, but will soon enough be a nothingburger:
When AI generates most code and more config files as well, most outages caused will be *technically* done by AI. In reality they happen thanks to inadequate verification/monitoring/rollback systems
Screenshot from today's @pragmaticengineer.com : newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-...
Amusing that Amazon's idea of catching up with Kiro is banning Claude Code (when they are an Anthropic investor!) instead of the other way around:
Let devs vote with their feet, and have the Kiro team actually feel the heat to catch up based on merit.
Poor strategy for Kiro IMO
