I’ve found that agents are great at debugging any problem when provided with this two-tier framework for troubleshooting. This requires enforcing discipline and imposing constraints, rather than give agents a free rein or vague end goals, but works better than unguided “loops”.

Ball-knowers knew all along that Twitter wasn’t just going to collapse after Elon fired 75% of the staff, because Twitter 1.0 had some of the best infrastructure engineers working on it, and when you get that calibre of people building your foundations, it lasts.

With agentic coding, even in the best case scenarios (where you read every line of generated code), there’s something we’ve lost, perhaps irrevocably. That has a real cost, & not to mention, second and third order effects, that “software factories” etc don’t necessarily solve.

Writing a post about “how to effectively debug code when you no longer fully understand it”. This is real bug I had to fix in ~9K LOC (100% AI generated). None of the tactics I started with here helped “root cause” the issue, lol. Had to take a different approach to isolate it.

One thing I don’t see many talk about is how coding agents can often *amplify* weaknesses, both individual and organizational. I think of this as the “empty calories” problem, which is exacerbated when “hyperproductivity” originates from your team’s “lowest common denominator”.

The people who blithely claim “you don’t need to understand the code anymore” aren’t telling you what debugging looks like in such cases Here’s one example where I had to debug a gnarly problem at work with Claude *without* access to the code Possible? Yes “Easy”? Nope 🙂‍↔️

August farmer’s markets in the Bay Area are worth a visit just for the abundance of fresh, juicy figs, and in-season tomatoes. 🍅 Refrigerated, slightly overripe figs make for the best dessert, IMO.

adopted ASD-STE100 in my project upon a coworker’s recommendation. Asking Opus 5 to write comments/commit messages etc in plain English has more benefits than just helping with readability. It discovers bugs. Critical bugs.😱 I was absolutely gobsmacked after seeing this. Wtf!

In recent weeks, when it came to tricky bugs (a memory leak, a routing issue, a sharding bug), Claude’s initial analysis was almost always 100% wrong. I had to give it multiple hypotheses, clues, ideas, suggestions for it to solve the bug. When asked “so, what did you learn?”

Went out to touch grass, but alas if you live in or around downtown San Francisco, there’s no escaping any discussion of AI, GPUs, agents etc, in public places. 😒 Maybe will try Marin or Sausalito the next time. At least the nosh (Gochujang Pimento Cheese Twist) was superb.