How I, a former CS prof, would design a CS program now

I was a bricklayer. It was how I paid the bills when I first moved to America. Even the biggest title in bodybuilding, Mr. Olympia, only paid a thousand dollars back then.  It makes me proud that in March, the winner of our Arnold Classic and our Arnold Classic UK took home more than a million dollars. He can focus on bodybuilding. But in our day, that wasn’t an option. Some guys were teachers. Some sold insurance. Franco and I laid bricks. We put an ad in the paper and sold ourselves as European craftsmen. We figured if people heard the accents, they would picture old-world masonry instead of two bodybuilders with a wheelbarrow.  It worked.  The phone rang. And then we had to go out and actually do the job, which was the part nobody could fake. Luckily, Franco knew what he was doing. The work was simple. Mix the mortar. Set the brick. Tap it level. Scrape the edge. Then do it again. And again. Nobody claps for you. There is no crowd, no music, no trophy. There is just the next brick sitting there waiting for you. You can still find some of the walls we built in Venice. That’s where my lesson today comes from. One brick doesn’t look like anything. Ten bricks don’t look like anything. A hundred bricks, you’re starting to see something, but it doesn’t impress anyone. You just keep laying bricks until the job is done. And you know what happens after four or five hours on a wall? You are so damn tired, or you feel so great that you stop measuring. You are not standing back every ten minutes asking how far from finished it is. You are covered in mortar, your hands are raw, you’re schvitzing, and you are happy. The work took the question away from you. That is the part nobody tells you about hard work: It doesn’t just build the wall. It terminates the voice that keeps asking when the wall will be done.

Our recent Nintendo #Switch2 announcement for Order of the Sinking Star was just the beginning, and we have more big news coming soon 👀 Stay tuned > bit.ly/m/SinkingStarGame

Looks like this may be the end of tweegeemee on X. I didn't notice this earlier, but X rolled out a new pay-per-use API and there is no free tier. Unless there is some change, this account will no longer post images.

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

Since announcing SuperSonic a few months ago I've made more than 50 releases and almost 700 commits. SuperSonic is no longer experimental, it's a robust well engineered & tested web synth. I'm going to build such cool stuff with it & I hope you do too! sonic-pi.net/supersonic/demo…

My Tailgunner Retro Arcade game Version 1.2 is up now. Gain an extra life if you get to 50 points. Added quick links to leader board and help from the start screen. rogerallen.itch.io/tailgunne…

It’s one of Oregon’s most iconic backpacking trips — 40 miles around Mount Hood on the Timberline Trail. Our outdoors intern Rose Shimberg circumnavigated the volcano and came back with reporting on how to make a trip happen: Story/video: tinyurl.com/5554j3t2

As of 7/21/2025, @tweegeemee is 10 years old! Happy Belated Birthday! It's been quite the odyssey, full of twists I never saw coming. Here's the first image posted tweegeemee.com/i/150721_2138…

This Twitter diaspora sucks. Someone should buy twitter dot com and just create a timeline of all the people I follow on BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads and X.

#BlueGhost got her first diamond ring! Captured at our landing site in the Moon’s Mare Crisium around 3:30 am CDT, the photo shows the sun about to emerge from totality behind Earth. Hope to have more shots to share soon! #BGM1

For the past two years, there has been a constant random "seed" value for tweegeemee. An hour ago, I changed it. This will result in a "reset" of tweegeemee image generation. A chance to start anew. 1/2

Sorry, but X has throttled the free API tier. I can't post 24x7 any longer. Please consider following on Tumblr, Threads, Mastodon or BlueSky if you want hourly posts...and for your likes and retweets to help evolve imagery.

Actually, this outage may be more than just throttling. Will check it out...

It only took 2 years, but diversifying to multiple social networks has enabled this bot's monthly activity to recover fully! Thank you to all my followers on all the socials!