It is 1985, the height of the soda/pop armaments race. Coca-Cola reveals some batches of New Coke have been found to contain rat poison. Not to be outdone, Pepsi introduces Pepsi Anthrax, which is immediately banned from sale...

This advice is intended for AI coding enthusiasts but like a lot of these best practices, it stems from pre-existing ideas: AI makes it too easy to skip the most important decisions in a project, the ones that happen right at the beginning. www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/lay-th...

I don't know what I expected, but neither ChatGPT nor Gemini were able to generate a 3D printable OpenSCAD model of a simple VESA mount. The lack of spatial reasoning on display, both for the object itself and the constraints of the printer, is comical.

Even though I've made this joke myself I actually really hate the "all developers have to be engineering managers now with agents" No, they all need to be tech leads, not ems. Unless you're having to deal with the agents' interpersonal issues and the PM distracting them and getting them promoted and

If you find the social media/sleep health studies worrying now, just wait until you read the AI/sleep studies coming in 10 years. Signed, Mr. No time for sleep my 5 hour window just reset

Worth a read pebblebed.com/blog/intelli...

When I read sensational LLM-breaks-out-of-sandbox stories I think of pet hamsters I once had who would eventually break out of any cage through pure, dumb persistence and luck. I was unimpressed then, and I'm unimpressed now.

At this point if you're writing a compiler for your new language, you may as well offer the option to pipe your errors and code context to an LLM agent. In the past I had too little patience to learn Rust, but it's quite pleasant now that I have an error-to-English translator.

This week I wrote something a bit more personal, about my history with anxiety disorder and why it's important to push back on the artificial urgency of AI. www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/the-ai...

You vibed an app, for an audience of one. Add it to Tiny Tool Town. But You know what Tiny Tool Town REALLY needed? *TIKTOK MODE* Why not mindlessly scroll awesome apps rather than videos? Maybe one will help you or someone else! go hit tinytooltown.com and tap "SHORTS" for Shorts/Reels Mode

Tiny Tool Town 🏘️

A delightful showcase for free, fun & open source tiny tools. Stupid-delightful software made with love.

tinytooltown.com

Sound analysis here: addyo.substack.com/p/the-80-pro.... The only quibble I have is with the oft-repeated idea that delegating to agents feels like being a manager. Respectfully, it does not.

The 80% Problem in Agentic Coding

Managing comprehension debt when leaning on AI to code

addyo.substack.com

In the time between the weekend when I decided to give it a whirl, and finally getting it running today, Clawdbot got renamed *twice*. I hope #openclaw has better longevity!

Sharing some background on my values. When I feel a lot of uncertainty about the future of our profession and our industry, it helps to go back to why I chose this career in the first place. www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/my-cod...

The Pragmatic Summit: A one-of-a-kind event where you'll hear from (and get to meet) standout folks who have been on The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, teams who were in The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives - all of them building cutting-edge software, or researching how best to do so.

“These "solutions" are fundamentally inequitable. They build a world of digital and physical segregation disguised as progress. And we users are expected to be thankful and grateful.” #a11y nimerblogs.blogspot.com/2025/08/cong...

Unpopular opinion of the day: protecting software developers from interruptions in the name of preserving "flow" state is overrated, and potentially harmful for the team as a whole. Deeper dive here: www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/flow-i...

I tried to make sense of "spec-driven development" by looking at 3 tools: Amazon's Kiro, GitHub's spec-kit, and the Tessl Framework martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Understanding Spec-Driven-Development: Kiro, spec-kit, and Tessl

Notes from my Thoughtworks colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery

martinfowler.com

If anyone from YouTube is following: you could save a ton of compute if we all just filled out a form documenting our current opinions and beliefs. The algorithm could more efficiently match us with confirming and affirming videos. Bonus: The form would never need updating!

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

My Berkeley colleagues & I are saddened by the death of our colleague Robin Lakoff. Her 1972 book Language & Women's Place created the modern field of language & gender. She also wrote articulately, passionately & impactfully about Latin linguistics (Abstract Syntax & Latin Complementation, 1968) 1/

If you've tried agentic AI coding for larger features and got stuck in a "death spiral", I highly recommend this pattern: www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/techni...

Wrote up some thoughts about the difficulty in using AI agents effectively in legacy codebases and how we might overcome it: www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/legacy...

I have a new blog post up: "Corporate 'DEI' Is An Imperfect Vehicle for Deeply Meaningful Ideals" charity.wtf/2025/02/10/c... I know a lot of people are feeling incredibly scared and demoralized right now. I get it; I am too. (Who knows if my marriage will still be valid in two years?)

Corporate “DEI” is an imperfect vehicle for deeply meaningful ideals

I have not thought or said much about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) over the years. Not because I don’t care about the espoused ideals — I suppose I do, rather a lot — but because corporate…

charity.wtf

A write-up of my recent experiment to build and deploy a personal self-hosted task list application using AI tools from scratch in a single week, how it went and what I learned. It is absolutely wild what we can do today with these tools! www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/the-ei...

"Having overcome my broader skepticism, I find I’m just shocked at the mental gymnastics militant cynics will execute to avoid admitting that generative AI is doing anything particularly unique or useful."--@mikecaulfield I do see that too sometimes. mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/critical-r...

Critical Reasoning with AI: How we know LLMs are applying reasoning patterns, and not just reverse image searching

Writing this because I'm tired of having this argument

mikecaulfield.substack.com

I wrote up a review of Cursor and how I use it for software development, which seems to be a hot (and mildly controversial) topic these days: www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/cursor...