I think review is more important than ever but once 5000 line PRs started flying daily and people that have zero business in code opening PRs everyone stopped caring. Took 2 months to destroy a great design and review culture here. Now it’s all “claude said”

Agents don't need types. They're perfectly capable of pulling off incredible refactorings without. Give them a linter and a test suite, and you have all you need. Token efficiency is where it's at.

Agents don't need types. They're perfectly capable of pulling off incredible refactorings without. Give them a linter and a test suite, and you have all you need. Token efficiency is where it's at.

Tactical vs Strategic Programming, and why I'm nervous for juniors: Good programming involves a mix of tactical and strategic decision-making: - Tactical: on the ground, short-term. The soldier doing the fighting. - Strategic: high-view, long-term. The general planning the war. You need to be a tactician to write good code. To choose the right syntax. To figure out the file structure. To figure out how best to test your changes. But you need to be a strategist to build code that lasts. To design the architecture. To automate away problems. To think beyond today. Agents have eaten the tactical part of programming. When you can pay below minimum wage for code, there's no point going into the trenches yourself. But AI cannot code strategically. Agents need someone at the top of the pyramid to tell them what to do. They need oversight. So, a developer's day-to-day job has become 100% strategy. Long-term thinking, all the time. (maybe this is why I'm so tired all the time now) If you identify as a tactical programmer - a code monkey - then you are out of luck. The job has changed. Personally, I like it. I always preferred thinking strategically about code. If you asked me what my job was about, I'd say 'building apps', not 'writing code'. But what makes me nervous is that we've pulled down the only bridge that brought juniors into the industry. We used to train juniors like this: 1. Give them only tactical tasks 2. Let them build up their strategic experience slowly Eventually, they are a good enough strategist that they are no longer a junior. But what happens when all tactical code is written by AI? What is the point of a junior? We obviously need juniors. We need new lifeblood coming into the industry. We need to leave paths open for extraordinary hires to enrich our companies. But how do we train them? How do you train strategic thinking? These are the questions I'm thinking about. I'd love to know your thoughts.

Like many things, the 80/20 rule applies. Spend time on the process and the plan, which allows you to move more quickly through implementation. Slow and steady is faster in the long run because you spend less time (and tokens) correcting mistakes.

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.