GPT isn't great at memes.

Claude's prediliction for calling me a linter makes me think how the tables have turned. "The linter removed the comment" "The linter already corrected it" "The linter renamed it"

I think AI is the best opening we've ever had to bring our engineering values to the mainstream, instead of the top single-digit-percent of teams it's always been. But nondeterminism will take more engineering discipline. Not less. charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/ai-demands...

AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

If you lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure, you should sense something oddly familiar about what's happening now.

charitydotwtf.substack.com

If you have suddenly unlocked a superpower that allows everyone you employ to be 2x (4x, 10x, whatever) more efficient and your response is to lay off a bunch of people instead of *doing more stuff*, why do you even run a company?

📝 When moving fast, talking is the first thing to break daverupert.com/2026/04/more...

I put together a piece on how I'm doing co-design with agents in some of my dev work at the moment, and how there's a very specific through line from XP and the sort of software design and intentionality I talk about often. Trying to capture my working patterns. davidwhitney.co.uk/blog/2026/03...

I love this insight from @icooper.bsky.social - that AI tools can do coding but not programming. ian-cooper.writeas.com/coding-is-de...

Coding Is Dead, Long Live Programming

Summary In this post, we argue that the role of a coder now belongs to a coding agent, but that the distinct role of a programmer define...

ian-cooper.writeas.com

If coding is your favorite part of software engineering, keep coding. AI doesn't stop you. But if coding was the only part you were good at, that's a different conversation. The job was always bigger than the code. #bransoncognac blog.bryanl.dev/posts/ai-sen...

AI Didn't Break the Senior Engineer Pipeline. It Showed That One Never Existed.

Most organizations never had a model for developing engineers. They had an environment that produced growth by accident. AI just made the luck run out.

blog.bryanl.dev

The “swarm of agents” model assumes work naturally splits into roles: marketing, sales, support, development = basically mirroring human job titles. But those titles and siloes are a byproduct of org scaling, not a universal truth about work. www.joanwestenberg.com/agentic-swa...

Agentic swarms are an org-chart delusion

The "agentic swarm" vision of productivity is comfortingly familiar. Which should be an immediate red flag... You take the existing corporate hierarchy, you replace the bottom layers with a swarm of AI agents, and you keep humans around as supervisors. It's an org chart with robots instead of interns. The

joanwestenberg.com

XP practices have never been more helpful than with all the speed that agents provide. More brains, tighter feedback loops, quality & safety let us take full advantage of the speed. Never has "uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it" felt more relevant.

Gergely Orosz@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 5mo ago

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!

Excellent article (more reminders from history)

Nobody knows what programming will look like in two years

Kent Beck doesn't know what programming will look like in two years, and he's been thinking about this longer than most of us.

leaddev.com

Whenever the topic of OKRs comes up, I think about Drucker vs Deming. Not a particularly topical thing to write about, but I think it's evergreen. surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/02/16/p...

Poor Deming never stood a chance

This post is an elaboration of a shorter post I wrote about five years ago. The two management giants of the mid-twentieth century were Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming. Ironically, while Drucke…

surfingcomplexity.blog

Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

We optimized for ultra individualistic velocity measures defining DevEx at EXACTLY the wrong time no wonder everyone is exhausted and scared

#London things

New blog post on the high costs of coordination and the implications for large organizations: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/24/b...

Because coordination is expensive

If you’ve ever worked at a larger organization, stop me if you’ve heard (or asked!) any of these questions: “Why do we move so slowly as an organization? We need to figure out how…

surfingcomplexity.blog

Ooh. Ollama just released Anthropic API impersonation, meaning you can set the endpoint to a local port and be off to the races! docs.ollama.com/integrations...

Claude Code - Ollama

docs.ollama.com

Shame that @intellijidea.com can't complete this refactoring itself. Not ideal that the refactoring takes compiling code and creates code that fails to compile. #java

Trying to identify this bird. LLMs like insisting it's various varieties of Californian bird but this is taken in Scotland. White Tailed Eagle? Buzzard? Osprey?

It was at this moment I realised that slick tyres may not have been the optimal choice this morning #cycling

Sea otter

It's not bad out

And we're back. Again! Happy Holiday Trek 2025. 🎄🖖🏻🎄 #HolidayCombs www.youtube.com/watch?v=26H_...

Here Comes Jeffrey Combs

YouTube video by John C. Worsley

youtube.com

I wrote a post about why I don't like the name that Amazon uses for their post-incident review process: "Correction of Error". surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/20/w...

Why I don’t like “Correction of Error”

Like many companies, AWS has a defined process for reviewing incidents. They call their process Correction of Error. For example, there’s a page on Correction of Error in their Well-Architect…

surfingcomplexity.blog

I want to see daylight again, Gandalf, daylight.

Discovered there's a setting to change #intellij 's default infuriating behaviour of opening seemingly random tab when you drag/split editor views. I really wonder why "Most recently opened tab" is not the default.

I like parameterised tests but find #junit 's EnumSource/MethodSource etc dissatisfying. Here's how you can parameterize tests with #java records gist.github.com/benjiman/e9f...

Today I'm grumpy at Chrome putting "split view" where open in new window has been in every browser, building muscle memory for decades…for a feature that everyone's window manager already has.

And here’s an excellent post on how to apply them (most of this is not Ruby-specific): obie.medium.com/ruby-was-rea...

Ruby Was Ready From The Start

Notes and expanded thoughts on eXtreme Programming, AI agents, and the soul of Ruby from my SF Ruby Conference Keynote 2025 talk

obie.medium.com

Hilarious and terrifying: jailbreak LLMs using poetry "These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols." arxiv.org/html/2511.15...