I’ve spent a couple of days at a Thoughtworks-organized event in Deer Valley Utah. It was my favorite kind of event, a really great set of attendees in an Open Space format. These kinds of events are full of ideas, which I do want to share, but I can’t truthfully form them into a coherent narrative for an article about the event. However this fragment format suits them perfectly, so I’ll post a bunch of fragmentary thoughts from the event, both in this post, and in posts in the next few days.
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We talked about the worry that using AI can cause humans to have less understanding of the systems they are creating. In this discussion one person pointed out that one of the values of Pair Programming is that you have to regularly explain things to your pair. This is an important part of learning – for the person doing the explaining. After all one of the best ways to learn something is to try to teach it.
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One attendee is an SRE for a Very (Very) Large Code Base. He was less worried about people not understanding the code an LLM writes because he already can’t understand the VVLCB he’s responsible for. What he values is that the LLM helps him understand the what the code is doing, and he regularly uses it to navigate to the crucial parts of the code.
There’s a general point here:
Fully trusting the answer an LLM gives you is foolishness, but it’s wise to use an LLM to help navigate the way to the answer.
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Elsewhere on the internet, Drew Breunig wonders if software libraries of the future might be only specs and no code. To explore this idea he built a simple library to convert timestamps into phrases like “3 hours ago”. He used the spec to build implementations in seven languages. The spec is a markdown document of 500 lines and a set of tests in 500 lines of YAML.
“What does software engineering look like when coding is free?”
I’ve chewed on this question a bit, but this “software library without code” is a tangible thought experiment that helped firm up a few questions and thoughts.
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Bruce Schneier on the role advertising may play while chatting with LLMs
Imagine you’re conversing with your AI agent about an upcoming vacation. Did it recommend a particular airline or hotel chain because they really are best for you, or does the company get a kickback for every mention?
Recently I heard and ex-Googler explain that advertising was a gilded cage for Google, and they tried very hard to find another business model. The trouble is that it’s very lucrative but also ties you to the advertisers, who are likely to pull out whenever there is an economic downturn. Furthermore they also gain power to influence content – many controversies over “censorship” start with demands from advertisers.
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The news from Minnesota continues to be depressing. The brutality from the masked paramilitaries is getting worse, and their political masters are not just accepting this, but seem eager to let things escalate. Those people with the power to prevent this escalation are either encouraging it, or doing nothing.
One hopeful sign from all this is the actions of the people of Minnesota. They have resisted peacefully so far, their principal weapons being blowing whistles and filming videos. They demonstrate the neighborliness and support of freedom and law that made America great. I can only hope their spirit inspires others to turn away from the path that we’re currently on. I enjoyed this portrayal of them from Adam Serwer (gift link)
In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.
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