@garybernhardt

Execute Program (learn programming tools quickly); Destroy All Software (dense programming screencasts); formerly Deconstruct conference.

 Seattle, WA
executeprogram.com
Joined March 2007
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139Media
evergreen controversial opinion: it is good to care about the quality of your work
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Programmers can make more now, but worse, to the delight of their employers. We continue to stray. "Good design is as little as possible. Less, but better, because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials."
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Gary Bernhardt retweeted
dax
@thdxr
Sep 17
the last 20% to get a product shipped and successful is as difficult as ever this is where 99% of programmers have always fallen off the first 80% is a lot easier and so we're seeing more abandoned projects than ever
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2006, condescendingly: "You use vim instead of an IDE? Why are you slowing yourself down for no reason?" 2026, condescendingly: "You read the code? Why are you slowing yourself down for no reason?" I WILL NEVER LOG OFF
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Its 2010. Me and 11 .NET programmers at a lunch table at a conference. They're adamant that you can't write "real software" in Python. I remember one of them genuinely smiling at how silly that idea was, like it was cute that I was so confused. That feeling recurs often lately.
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Gary Bernhardt retweeted
Mitchell Hashimoto
@mitchellh
Sep 16
The "whiteboard defense:" I should be able to pull you aside at any moment and ask you to explain any customer-facing system you've shipped. You should be able to clearly explain how it works and defend the decisions you made. This is my benchmark for responsible AI usage. I don't expect line-level familiarity with the code. I don't care if you remember the exact function name or implementation detail. You may not even know it. I don't care. But if I ask "why did you do X instead of Y?", "what happens if this actor behaves maliciously?", "what data structure did you use here and why?", or "where does this fail?" you should be able to answer confidently. For PoCs, demos, experiments, whatever: I don't care. Generate 100% of it and understand none of it. Speed over quality every time in those specific scenarios. But if you're shipping customer-facing work, you can't be shipping things you don't understand at a high level.
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"Why does it matter?" Because cognitive complexity sets the ceiling for what you can do, whether "you" is human or not. You have limited attention and capacity for context, whether those are attention heads and context tokens or just regular attention and memory in your meat.
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It's so surreal to contrast actual agent output with the things that I see people say about them here. In everyday changes, my reviews often cut the diff to 25% of its original size. Tons of useless tests; paranoia; inverted logic. Then I read Twitter and "coding is solved".
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(If only we were so good at neutrally describing our mistakes!)
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If you're not heavily trimming everything agents do, I think you're probably experiencing a control flow and configuration explosion that's largely invisible to you.
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It's amazing that just a few years ago, AI fears would get responses like "we wouldn't just give them uncontrolled access to our computers." How many computers run a coding agent in YOLO mode per day? Arbitrary code execution, usually on admin accounts, with full internet access.
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Lots of "they used it wrong" here. 90s flashback: "if your C has memory leaks or use-after-free bugs, you used it wrong." It's true in a sense, but these beliefs hinder progress. If most people "use it wrong", that's a shortcoming in the tool. nitter.cf/artalar/status/2098108…
artalar
@artalar
Sep 10
I hate HATE H. A. T. E. SSR
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This will lead to the same result we always got with human-written code. To satisfy the metric, the programmer/agent will spread control flow complexity out into different functions. It's all still there, but harder to understand because it's spread out. nitter.cf/asidorenko_/status/209…
Alex Sidorenko
@asidorenko_
Sep 5
> "Agents produce overly verbose code that's hard to read and understand" Try setting a Cognitive Complexity rule in Biome. This metric is specifically designed to test how hard the code is to understand
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An analogy that comes to mind: "If you want good visual design, can't you just give the programmers a tightly constrained design system to work in? Then they'll only make good designs that fit the system." It probably sounds totally reasonable if you've never tried it.
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Never underestimate the depths of programmers' visual design depravity or LLMs' system design depravity.
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important: [good thing / bad thing] is happening entirely because [it involves AI / does not involve AI] and anyone who doesn't realize this [is a decel / has AI psychosis]
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I pressed it further. It said that the memory is actually there. I asked it why it said it wasn't there, twice, and now says it is there. Its response: actually, the memory is NOT there. My experience is that you can get an LLM to get in circles like this about almost anything.
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