Most of What We Call Progress - Yusuf Aytas

The Future of Software Development is Software Developers – Codemanship’s Blog

The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking – with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions – into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language.

That was the hard part when programmers were punching holes in cards. It was the hard part when they were typing COBOL code. It was the hard part when they were bringing Visual Basic GUIs to life (presumably to track the killer’s IP address). And it’s the hard part when they’re prompting language models to predict plausible-looking Python.

The hard part has always been – and likely will continue to be for many years to come – knowing exactly what to ask for.

cubic blog: The real problem with AI coding

Can you ship AI-generated code without creating a maintenance nightmare six months from now? Can you debug it when it breaks? Can you modify it when requirements change? Can you onboard new engineers to a codebase they didn’t write and the AI barely explained?

Most teams haven’t realized this shift yet. They’re optimizing for code generation speed while comprehension debt silently accumulates in their repos.

One team I talked to spent 3 days fixing what should have been a 2-hour problem. They had “saved” time by having AI generate the initial implementation. But when it broke, they lost 70 hours trying to understand code they had never built themselves.

That’s comprehension debt compounding. The time you save upfront gets charged back with interest later.

Web developers: remarkably untalented and careless? – Baldur Bjarnason

I’d like to suggest that everybody in web dev point their dysfunctional novelty seeking (of which I suffer as well) in the direction of HTML and CSS. See how much can be done without JavaScript. It’s a lot! Then look at writing more lightweight JavaScript that’s layered on top of the HTML as enhancements. Because it’s an enhancement and not required for functionality, you can cut the line higher and use newer tech without worry.

See how refreshing that feels.

Agile and the Long Crisis of Software

Time and again, organizations have sought to contain software’s most troublesome tendencies—its habit of sprawling beyond timelines and measurable goals—by introducing new management styles. And for a time, it looked as though companies had found in Agile the solution to keeping developers happily on task while also working at a feverish pace. Recently, though, some signs are emerging that Agile’s power may be fading. A new moment of reckoning is in the making, one that may end up knocking Agile off its perch.

Making Colophon Cards – Baldur Bjarnason

I think Baldur is onto something here with his categorisation of software. There’s the software based on innovation, something truly novel:

Innovation’s the word. Pushing the boundaries. You know the phrases. Usually spouted by that dude at the party.

Then there’s the software based on itertion, making a better version of a proven tool:

We are now in a place where we have entire genres of software that have decades of history, are backed by stacks of new and old research, have dozens of successful, well-made exemplar apps, and a broad enough conceptual space to allow for new variations on the theme.

In short, we have genre software and we have avant-garde software, and I’ve always been more interested in genre fiction than literary fiction.