In response to my last fragments (probably the bit about us worrying if LLMs have consciousness when we when we should be wondering why they don’t have a conscience) “Metalanguage” replied: we shipped the id and forgot the superego. classic software lifecycle. I don’t know what was on their mind, but their post immediately made me think of the classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. Plenty of sci-fi, and other literature, have explored humans creating technology with unintended behavior, going back at least to Mary Shelly. But that movie was particularly influential on sci-fi film-making and in…
Not every presentation needs slides, but when they earn their place, they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than replacing them. Sumeet Gayathri Moghe sets out the principles that follow from that idea — control over the rate of knowledge exposition, tight coupling between slides and speaker, minimalism by default, visuals that say more than words can, and never sending your slides out in advance. more…
A Sensible Default is a practice that, absent some overriding context, should be used when carrying out a certain kind of task. In software development such sensible defaults might include things like “use version control”, “separate UI logic from domain logic”, “automate deployment pipelines”. The term “sensible default” is a deliberate contrast to “best practice”. Folks dislike calling things “best practice” because that term implies a general presumption that the best practice is something we should always expect to do. A “sensible default”, however, is something that should be reassessed…
Simon Willison: The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge This has been a constant impression I get from following Willison’s writing. While things like vibe coding get a lot of attention, the real strength of agentic programming relies on more sophisticated techniques - and these are not easy to learn or execute. It’s a reason I’m wary of extrapolating my own dabblings into firm opinions about…
Rob Bowley is “flipping tables in his head” with anger at the current media coverage of the danger of AI killing us all The risk I’m worried about isn’t a future machine deciding to wipe us out. It’s today’s AI, being wired into everything, carelessly and fast. Cyber attacks have already cost millions of dollars in lost economic output, often without AI being involved at all. Bowley feels the push to slow down AI is distracting us from the problems that are lurking with current technology. Too often agents are deployed in situations where they include the Lethal Trifecta, opening up a gaping…
Human collaboration, like most things, improves with feedback. But it's not obvious how to make feedback effective. Anuja Karnik and Sumeet Gayathri Moghe pass on a bevy of tips for healthy feedback, based on the principle that both praise and criticism should be seen as positive. more…
I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in productivity - and thus the products we could rapidly build. On the other hand, I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons. But, back on my first hand, LLMs might also design miracle cures, and come up with clever ways to raise our prosperity. Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train. It’s a wild ride and I just hope we’ll…
Reports of agentic hacking continue, in this case it happened back in May and it seems OpenAI did not disclose that they were responsible. Simon Willison sees two options: After the Hugging Face and Wiki attacks OpenAI were still unable to review their previous logs and determine that they had previously attacked RubyGems. They knew about the attack on RubyGems and made the decision not to reach out to the RubyGems team about it. Both of these are bad! Given this incident, the Hugging Face situation, and the Wiki attack, the obvious question right now is how many more incidents like this are…
Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative. He advises distilling the big idea, visualizing the audience, and building a structured storyline. more…
A quick survey of recent engagement of my posts on social media, indicating which service has by far the most engagement, and which service has seen a precipitous decline since early 2025. more…
Christian Catalini says we’re in a situation where we are vastly reducing the cost of generating things, but not the cost of verifying them:. This explains why the first major AI products appeared in chat, image generation, and code assistance. Not because these were the hardest human problems, but because their outputs were relatively easy to inspect. A user can judge the tone of a message, look at an image, or run a test on a piece of code. […] The old automation boundary was routine versus non-routine work. The new boundary is increasingly measurable versus non-measurable work. The issue…
Like me, Sumeet Gayathri Moghe is tired of poor presentations with bad slide decks. He's started to write a series of posts on how to avoid these calamities, beginning with a post that questions whether a presentation is needed at all. more…
The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage. Often we talk about certain habits, in programming or life, are good or bad. But few things are simple binaries. Some vary with context: reading a book is a good thing sitting in my garden, but not while driving my car. But another variable is dosage: a little pain-killer salves my headache, but too much will kill me. The importance of dosage was noticed by a 16th century Swiss physician called Paracelsus. His quote was originally in German “Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift…
Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, the team accidentally prompted the agents into creating a blackboard coordination system inside the git repository. more…
TL;DROr, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems I was on a panel recently with Brian Houck from DX at Code Remix, hosted by Moderne. It was one of the more interesting panels I’ve done, largely because we disagreed. As my colleague Martin Fowler says, panels are much more interesting when people disagree and both sides have a good argument. Brian and I definitely did. Brian has since written a thoughtful piece called What are code reviews even for? He is clearly passionate about his position, and I am…
Like many readers, I’m wary of AI generated prose. Simon Wilison has written an LLM cliché highlighter - paste in some text, or a URL, and it will flag various patterns common to LLMs. It references a wikipedia page of signs of AI writing. That page points out that: Humans are notoriously bad at distinguishing human and LLM-generated text. While research on humans’ abilities to detect AI-generated text is still limited, a 2025 study has shown that human ability to distinguish LLM text from human is no better than random chance. Another 2025 study on German theses has shown that humans managed…
Lots of organizations are excited about what AI can do to streamline their processes, save money, and juice margins. But AI's capabilities are founded on the data that AI accesses, and for many organizations that foundation is little more than sand. Pramod Sadalage and Prem Chandrasekaran write about how to build a reliable foundation of data that can be accurate and trusted. more…
I was listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Helen Toner about the recent OpenAI hack of Hugging Face and the subsequent discovery that there were swarms of agents inside OpenAI doing unsanctioned activities. One of the points Klein made was that at no point did any of these (thousands of?) agents ever try to check in with a human [Klein:] So these message boards — you have however many A.I. agents posting hundreds of thousands of messages. At no point do they say: Hey, researchers, programmers, parents at OpenAI, Anthropic — do you want us coordinating with each other on this message board…
TL;DRWhy building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The conversation usually starts the same way. A non-techie, maybe an executive, tells me about something they’ve built over the weekend. Sometimes it’s a chatbot. Sometimes it’s an internal workflow. Sometimes it’s a surprisingly polished application that solves a real business problem. They’re excited, and they should be.…
Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It's a style that I advocate, and my contributors mostly follow. Jim decided it was important to give it a name, and identify what makes it distinctive. more…
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