In my 25+ yr career in (systems) software engineering, I can count on one hand the number of real paradigm shifts I’ve seen:

• Ubiquitous automated testing, eg unit tests
• Modern network routing fabrics, which made intra-DC bandwidth effectively infinite and intra-DC latency effectively zero for most workloads, Patterson notwithstanding
• SSDs, which combined the speed of memory with the capacity of disk. No more counting seeks!
• Cloud infrastructure
• AI coding

I’m not saying anything new by including AI coding here. I don’t fully know what its long term effects will be. I doubt many of us do. And the industry is obviously far from perfect.

But coming from a late adopter, and a skeptic in general, it’s still very clearly a big deal. And I don’t see those often.

…this produces what I will call the AI Developer’s Descent Into Madness:

1. Whoa, I produced this prototype so fast! I have super powers!
2. This prototype is getting buggy. I’ll tell the AI to fix the bugs.
3. Hmm, every change now causes as many new bugs as it fixes.
4. Aha! But if I have an AI agent also review the code, it can find its own bugs!
5. Wait, why am I personally passing data back and forth between agents
6. I need an agent framework
7. I can have my agent write an agent framework!
8. Return to step 1

It’s actually alarming how many friends and respected peers I’ve lost to this cycle already.

Avery Pennarun, Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

Best paper title I’ve seen in a long time:

Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog

I am Springsteen, going on Spreventeen

– Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

smoke ’em if you got ’em