Tagged: programming

Drew Breunig:

I'm lucky enough to talk to a range of developers and teams, spanning a variety of company sizes and a broad array of skill sets. From these conversations, two beliefs have emerged and solidified about coding agents and their (current) impact on coding.

Drew makes two very astute observations, both of which I endorse. The first one in particular is under-appreciated:

Most talented developers do not appreciate the impact of the intuitive knowledge they bring to their coding agent.

Coding agents are amplifiers of skills of the engineers that wield them, they are not magic beans that'll let an amateur cook up a compiler.

The second observation should be obvious to anyone who has built software products, but somehow the current mania is making people ignore it:

Most work people are sharing are incredible personal tools, but they are not capital-P products.

Simon Willison:

We coined a new term on the Oxide and Friends podcast last month (primary credit to Adam Leventhal) covering the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.

We're calling it Deep Blue.

This document is the result of a series of discussions, some online and some in person, held between Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and John Ousterhout between September 2024 and February 2025.

John is the author of the book A Philosophy of Software Design (APOSD), a book that was first published in 2018. This book has been on my “to read” list for a while now—I’ve heard very good reviews for it from a lot of people.

“Uncle Bob” Martin and his 2008 book Clean Code of course need no introduction. Clean Code is one of the OG books on modern programming¹.

This is an open debate between the two authors on the ideas they disagree on. And—wow, wow, wow—what a fantastic debate this is! The quality and depth of discussion is great, they both pull all the punches without holding back, and yet they are very civil throughout. I have never seen anything like this.

I mostly side with John in this debate. While I found many ideas in Clean Code to be very good—especially when I read it many many years ago as a young engineer, I’ve over time felt that it’s too dogmatic and not all that pragmatic.

This is a long read, but it’s well worth your time if you tend to geek out on the nuances of programming and low-level design.