The term technical debt is often used to refer to the accumulation of design or implementation choices that later make the software harder and more costly to understand, modify, or extend over time...
The 80% Problem in Agentic Coding
Managing comprehension debt when leaning on AI to code
The New Software Lifecycle
I co-wrote a Google whitepaper about how AI is changing the software lifecycle. I'm not going to summarize the whole thing. Instead, here are the handful of ...
The Future of Software Engineering Isn’t What You Think
Over the past two decades, I’ve watched software eat the world, then hardware catch up, then Generative AI reshape both at the same time…
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Coding agents as normal technology
AI should help us produce better code - Agentic Engineering Patterns
AI should help us produce better code - Agentic Engineering Patterns
Reducing the cognitive load of AI changes
When reviewing large amounts of AI-generated code, I often find that the LLM chooses terms for abstractions that do not always map to my own choices. For instance, what it may call a MutationIntent might personally be more natural to me as an EditRequest. Because the LLM's choice of words is not my ideal choice, I have to do a mental lookup of what it means every time I see it, which adds cognitive load.
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog
The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now.
On AI and building your own GIS software
Of the thousands of essays over the past two years surrounding AI and its implications are some very thought provoking ones with enormous implications for GIS. Some of the essays are around the the…
Artificial Intelligence Glossary | Stanford HAI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly growing, with new terms and concepts being introduced at a breakneck speed. You may have seen terms such as AGI, machine learning, or foundation models in media headlines, emerging legislation, or in your everyday life.
AI costs how much? GitHub Copilot users react to new usage-based pricing system.
Some report burning through their whole monthly "AI credit" allotment in a single day.
Who Pays for the Commons?
Three and a half years after the emergence of generative AI as a new technology paradigm, there is broad agreement that AI companies have extracted enorm...
What AI coding costs you | Tom Wojcik
What's the effect of the prolonged AI usage among coders and is it tracked correctly, if it all?
Is AI causing a repeat of Frontend’s Lost Decade? | Mastro Blog
AI is doing to programming what framework-brain did to the frontend before. Deskilling, or just working at a higher level of abstraction?
The Eternal Sloptember
I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.