Fixed time, variable scope
Just like content development in any other medium, software development reduces to the elimination of entropy. Unlike other media, however, there is very little else to count. The problem is that you and/or your team can only eliminate a fixed-ish number of bits of entropy per unit time, and at the outset you don’t know how many bits there are in the problem to eliminate. So you say we’re gonna work this much, and whatever comes out the other end of that process is whatever you get. In the current theory, and sometimes in practice, this is how sprints are supposed to work, and the material that doesn’t fit is accumulated into some backlog or other.
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:
- Whoa, I produced this prototype so fast! I have super powers!
- This prototype is getting buggy. I’ll tell the AI to fix the bugs.
- Hmm, every change now causes as many new bugs as it fixes.
- Aha! But if I have an AI agent also review the code, it can find its own bugs!
- Wait, why am I personally passing data back and forth between agents
- I need an agent framework
- I can have my agent write an agent framework!
- Return to step 1
It’s actually alarming how many friends and respected peers I’ve lost to this cycle already.
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
first law of thermodynamics
conservation of energy
🤝
double entry bookkeeping
conservation of money