Just another developer. 🇦🇷🇬🇧

London, UK
Joined October 2008
TIL Opus 5.5 confuses "boolean blindness" with "boolean trap" 🤦‍♂️ Strange I haven't noticed this before, wonder if this is a regression in 5.5 ? So you have to include a brief definition of boolean blindness where you mention it.
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Relevant because Claude (tell it to avoid garden path sentences to generate output that's more readable)
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lol qwen3.8-flash drifted into nonsense... hadn't seen that in a while!
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Mauricio Scheffer retweeted
a few companies have made MCP servers but make you register a custom oauth app for it slack is one of these, it makes the whole flow suck why are they doing this?
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Mauricio Scheffer retweeted
everything i know about managing agents i learned from the amazing programmers and computer scientists that came before constraints in your codebase are freeing for both humans and agents! this has always been true, but if you were a small dev team you likely never had to think that deeply because you could trust your fellow programmers to write code and review well but large companies have had to solve this problem since even before agents. because before you had agent slop, you had human slop. lots of engineers wrote bad code out of necessity (eg backend engineer forced to write frontend or reverse). the solution to this was constraints: lint rules, smarter compilers and diagnostics, high quality tests, investments into observability, and so on the arrival of agents just means that big company problems are now everyone's problems. the good news is that none of this is really that novel: it's just good engineering youtube.com/watch?v=GqmsQeSz…
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Amazing how github copilot reviews went from being shit to being amazing to now being mostly an annoyance, all in a few months. They now apparently run skills randomly with no chance of turning that off ffs
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Mauricio Scheffer retweeted
The Netherlands is gonna run NixOS on all their government computers.
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Mauricio Scheffer retweeted
I'm ready to be wrong on this, but the idea that assembly is, or ever will be, a good language for agents feels ridiculous. It forces the agent to attend to a huge number of extra details. Same problem as with humans! Why spend limited attention and context on that?
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"So the honest answer is: I implemented the shared-prompt target you asked for, but I did not run the optimization method I told you I would use" Well fuck you very much for wasting my tokens gpt-6-sol
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I still don't trust agents to push back as much as they should. Some of the things I often say: "what do you think?" "I could be wrong, be objective" because as it turns out I am very often wrong.
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What I'm settling on for now is a first pass of agent reviews, which include several project-specific properties, and then a human review, which is actually mainly trying to infer missing properties to be encoded as automated checks.
If you’ve stopped doing human code reviews: how is it going? If you’re still doing them: how are you able to keep up with the explosion of code + PRs, and how do you prioritise what to review “properly”?
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Unfortunately that extraction of properties cannot be automated yet, as far as I have tried at least
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The really important bit that not enough people are talking about is how you still absolutely have to own the spec of *what* you're doing and *why*. Applying AI on that has IME created a huge leverage across the team. But people keep talking about using AI for code only. 🤷‍♂️
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I bet most people that say AGENTS.md is an antipattern just vibe it and let the clankers manage it and have no idea what's in it. Though I do agree that a bad AGENTS.md is worse than having none at all. You really really really have to own every bit that's in there.
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Devs: I hate Claudese / claudeisms! The clankers write too much / wrong code documentation! Also devs: ackshually AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md is an antipattern, delete it 🙄
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Great, now I can’t snack while I work because chewing interferes with shouting at the clanker. My monitor’s got bits of peanut stuck to it now.
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If your name is on it, whatever you said *you* are saying it, regardless of the tool you used to craft the message. Same thing goes for code BTW. If that slop has your name on it it's *your* slop, I don't care what tool you used to create it.
Question for people who run autoreply bots here: are you not worried about the negative impact they have on your professional reputation? Anyone checking your profile here - a potential future employer for example - will instantly be able to tell you automated replies with a bot
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Was diagnosing some radio issues in a cheap tablet last night and seeing good old AT commands in the logs brought a smile to my face :)
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It's not even 8am and I've already had to tell Opus: "we're not philosophising here, we're doing software engineering" 🤦‍♂️
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