I ride a yak to work every day. Tech + bad jokes. He/him https://xitter.cf/t.co/sTL6FurCji. Mastodon: @kkuchta@ruby.social Bluesky: @kevinkuchta.com

San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2009
My RubyConf talk is online! "Everything a Microservice: The Worst Possible Intro to dRuby" This talk teaches you about the little-known "dRuby" package in the standard lib by building the most ridiculous microservice architecture you can come up with. youtu.be/cC4kRXAnunc
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I want a wine so tannic it’ll stab me in the dark and steal my teeth.
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Kevin Highwater retweeted
There's some senior engineers on here who, in the face of AI changing the very structures this industry is built on, present themselves as Stewards of the Craft of Programming. Bugs the hell out for me. They keep alluding to the virtue of doing things by hand, the value of Good Code and of craftsmanship, saying that yes, AI might change some things, but hey it won't ever change the value of something done with proper care, by hand, just like in the olden days of 2024. Most everything that was Good back then is still Good now: deep knowledge of languages and systems, good code, great architecture. You know the sermon. And, yes, some of that *is* true. At least I think so. But we don't know, because no one truly knows what will be important in the future. We're going through times of great change and I think the best advice to give to young people and others who want to have a job and provide value is: keep your eyes open, rethink from first principles, derive from what businesses value what you can provide; the digital world is more malleable than ever, you should rethink how you can help shape it. All this pounding on the Bible of Good Code seems to me to be doing the opposite: it lets people feel comfortable -- what I've valued all my life is still valuable, I can rest easy -- in times when one shouldn't feel comfortable. This is a bumpy, exciting, strange ride. If you lean back you might fall off the waggon. Let's not delude ourselves and others that we can keep doing what we've been doing. Rethink it all. And, like I said, it bugs the hell out of me seeing senior engineers (that are secure in their career) talking as if there's nothing *really* to change, because the Fundamentals will still be valued. They might! But it's the wrong advice to not rethink everything right now.
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Kevin Highwater retweeted
I think the general direction of this is correct. What I have found effective over the last couple of years is periodically go searching for limits of a model by finding tasks it fails at, so you can recalibrate. This is an era of humility, keep throwing away what you know.
call me crazy but i actually think if you’ve been vibe coding for the last 12 months you’re at a disadvantage your expectations of what models like opus 5.5 can do are probably too low and your workflow are probably too complex for their own good you can literally just tell it what you want and it’ll do it. literally that’s it
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My new favorite AI prompt: I’m traveling in <country> near <city>. I’m going to send you pictures of random things along the road- give me context on what I’m seeing. Great for figuring out that weird farming practice or odd structure!
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I'm setting up the donut.com slack app for the first time since covid. You can tell they believe in the quality of the product when they charge me money to turn *off* features (badges, points, and other gamification widgets).
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Apparently DHH gave a Rails keynote arguing that hand-written code is dead. The ruby community, at least online, seems to be pushing back pretty hard. The dude is morally reprehensible for unrelated reasons, but I don't think he's wrong on this.
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The ruby community has always been infused with a love for the craft of coding. It's one of the things that drew me to it for so many years. Unfortunately, I think it's something that's going to hold it back now. For reference, I haven't hand-written code in maybe 8 months.
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w-e-l-p.com/ remains my favorite single-serving website.
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We finally gave up on github's UI for *listing* PRs. We vibe-coded an internal list UI that only shows PRs with a `needs-human-review` tag. Added CI icons, "claiming", and grouping that fit out needs. And, importantly, a checkbox to hide PRs authored by @mikejulian.
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OH: "Otel is short for Open Telemachus"
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How I explain my job: I'm so good at pressing buttons that they *pay* me to do it.
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I just had to majorly update my understanding of a thing. I was under the outdated impression that "AI text detection" was basically snake oil. @QuinnyPig introduced me to pangram.com and... yeah... I can't seem to fool it. I guess we have that capability now!
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As I have more and more personal + work projects going, I'm increasingly getting value out of standardizing my dev task runner for things like starting a dev server or running tests. I used to use `make`, but I switched to github.com/casey/just a while back. Big fan.
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It's `make`, but with less historical cruft and a lot of basic CLI niceties built-in. And argument-handling that doesn't suck. Agents are happy to add it and use it. Definitely been a nice improvement!
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We assess for *correctness* via automated means: greptile reviews, testing, deterministic linting, agent-based linting, adversarial agent reviews, etc. At this point, we don't think there's much value in human reviewers evaluating this.
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We are getting a lot of value out of AI tools that help us review a PR at a high-level. stagereview.app was great, but it died. Devin.ai's code review tool is fine. Assert.dev's "cluster tree" is great, but their UI is lacking for now.
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We've been discussing the role of code review in the agent age. Current take: CR exists, now, only to spread knowledge of the system. So: - Most PRs don't need review - High-impact (api, terraform, or pattern changes) do - Review intent + structure, not lines of code
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If you put a really tiny dog in a vest, that's a micro service dog
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My current focus in AI tooling is on cloud agents. I'd really like to get away from my single dev environment as a bottleneck. Currently messing with Hoplite, Ampcode, and Devin (yes *that* devin, believe it or not).
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I've been using Cursor's cloud agents for months, but they're pushing grok more and more. It seems clear they're angling to be The Grok Harness, so I think it's a good time to migrate elsewhere.
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