CTO @entitledsol. Scalable systems, vibe curator, backprop revelator
Noida, India
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Breathe In… Breathe Out
Start thinking of your daily work with coding agents as breath work. You breathe in, then you breathe out. It's the most natural thing in the world.
Inhale. Describe what you want. The agent writes a bunch of code. You figure out what you actually wanted by iterating over what the agent does. Expansion. Keep inhaling. Exploration is nearly free, so you give feedback, until it seems right. Very good. Keep inhaling. Eventually your lungs feel full, no more air fits. You're done with the inhale, but that's only half the work.
Now comes the next half, the exhale. Take what you created. Tell the agent to fold it back into what already existed before. A brand new flow turns out to be just like an old flow, except with one branch in it. Good. Refactor. Delete the new flow. Somewhere three directories over there's a helper that already does what the agent wrote out. Refactor. Delete the duplicate code, and use the helper. Contract. Contract. Contract. Exhale completely, until there is nothing left except the essence of the new functionality. The lungs are empty, but the oxygen entered the body. The breath is done.
Only now do you make the PR, no earlier! Both inhale and exhale, the expansion and the contraction of the code belong in the same pull request. A full breath, or nothing.
Begin to think about merging pre-contraction code as holding your breath. Its technical debt is carbon dioxide, retained. Fine for a minute, then uncomfortable. Unsustainable. Painful, and if not remedied, darkness.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Always.
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h/t @fractaledmind for the "always expand and contract in a single PR" idea that sparked this metaphor, along with the bout of bronchitis I managed to pick up in Austin at @railsworld this year
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That will take another cycle of psychosis for everyone before they can go back to some semblance of a normal sleep schedule
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Not a world changing demo day. But a good ecosystem consolidation. Bots, Cloud Agents, Classifiers, Official Login with ChatGPT sub (Your turn @claudeai )
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Pre Clanker Me building a chat UI - messages send, and show up in the chat, good enough
Post Clanker Me:
- the scroll isn't smooth enough
- the font weights should be just right
- when I hit Send, the message should pop into the messages list at just the right speed, not too slow
- the send icon should have the perfect alignment with the composer edge
- when I am typing in the composer & the text flows over to the next line & the composer has to resize in height, it should do so in a slow transition
- oh, let's put some liquid glass in here
- something's still off
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Being born in the 90s
> Went from cassettes Walkmans to DiscMans
> Went from Landlines to Mobiles
> Went from DiscMans to LimeWire
> From DialUp connections to BroadBands
> To no-internet on phones to data packs
> From No Social Media to Yahoo IM to Orkut to FB to Insta/X whatever
> From Keypads to TouchScreens to Dictation
> From programming to agent herding
I don't think much of the previous generations experienced the amount of change we've witnessed so far and it doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon
My god this is such a good speech that every SWE needs to hear. You know what? Every person should hear it
Keep the happy memories, eyes on the reality, be excited about the future. That’s the best that anyone can do
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There’s one side, which just doesn’t like dictation while using their clankers. And then there’s one who loves it. I have started enjoying it more and more because it lets me give out all the little details which I might have skipped, had I had to type it all..
Which side are you on?
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Dear streaming platforms, I swear I will watch all the ads without fast forwarding, if you just release the whole season in one go
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