Notes

Joel spolsky’s book , [1], his blog, his phrase, is specifically two parts. Intriguingly, just like with students and with large language models, we are more obsessed with the first. In an interesting twist maybe we can slice this further. Nassim Taleb said [6] he valued erudition over intelligence A nature vs nurture thing? Side note, listening to Kathryn Paige Harden [10], describe it, heritability is sort of the expression of a phenotype, and within the behoviorol sense, this is very much tangled up in the nurture. So the expression happens in an environment, like a seed can end up as a stubby tree or a broad tree depending on whether the rain and sun are to its preference. (Anecdotally there was a very very sad orange tree in my apartment which got no direct sunlight and did not last long). ...

A friend sent a Nicholas Taleb quote, that got me thinking, “They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes.” ...

I suspect Matt Pocock [1] , (along with Dax Raad and Peter Steinberger), is someone who sits kind of in the middle of the debate about just how much more productive coding agents can make you wrt the software development lifecycle. On one extreme is Steve yegge who is kind of declaring orchestration is here, and you need not, ever look at code again, just express your intent and the swarms[4] will manifest it. Or something [5]. Chaos theory be damned. 100x to 1000x productivity is claimed. (Holding my breath?) There are many others in this camp. I would like to understand them better. ...

Exploring Kelley’s benevolent noncompliance [1], has been more formally studied as goal displacement [10], exploration vs exploitation, but also creative deviance. Kelley’s take is about how organizations are kind of like functioning alcoholics, formal and goal-oriented looking on the outside, but held together by unsanctioned thankless sustainment and stewardship of the few. This paper [2] formally explores this topic–no pun intended 😆–and my initial thought is that cultivating deviant creativity is a kind of artform. Helicopter management can likely only will it into wilting. ...

Realizing, i have discussed the topic of llm short cuts many times, but have not mentioned how prescient the 2012 article from erik dietrich on this was. on the rise of the expert beginner, Diedtrich argues that there ore many people who fall into mediocrity because they have achieved expert status and there’s noth hing left to learn. And I suspect llms can also hold back your learning while feeding you enough positive feedback to keep you happy where you are. They are holding you back by stunting your deep learning. ...

When I think of swarm, I think of bees or ants, preprogrammed by millenia of evolution. Each generation, following a script built into their bee-knees and ant-bdomens. Interestingly, survival of the fittest – a quote apparently a philosopher coined after reading Origin of Species but not Darwin himself wrote – maybe doesn’t mean the best particular colony carries on, but more like the particular gene line in a particular place on Earth – so Selfish Gene. ...

I have had access to claude at work now for maybe two weeks now. Incidentally, I had already been using open code at home for a few weeks now at this point, so I’m wary of slot machining. I notice myself leaning into lift coding. So in data science speak, lift is the benefit above a baseline. So this can be using claude to rewrite a small piece of code based on a colleague’s PR feedback almost on the spot as opposed to perhaps waiting for some down time when I might get around to it. And I was iterating on a function, replacing it with a new one, and I found myself using claude to update the unit tests. That was really nice. Maybe I would have put off writing the unit test until later. ...

I had a coworker who left our team less than a year in because we would not cut down our development loops. By development loop, here I mean, if you want to write some new feature in a code base, can you test it locally, deploy it somewhere, test it closer to its real running conditions, and then make it live. But you typically need to do this many times, REPL style, because typically cannot predict statically if some patch has the intended outcome. So that’s why it’s a loop. This is also the itch of the Continuous Delivery [1] author, Jez Humble. I recall when my coworker was there, most of our code base was scattered across code islands, water gapped, through ship captains who could island hop you from one island to another. Testing was often impossible because of various databricks dependencies. Deploying to staging was sludgy, you know, slow and kludgy; you had to know about undocumented steps. Jiggle the keys in your ignition to start your car just right without shearing them off, after hearing your starter struggle-rattling. She’s still seaworthy, after a few attempts, you hear the car starts. My coworker’s frustration came to a head when he started his first and possibly last support rotation. When things failed and he found much of the team was perfectly fine with the inadequate pace to Jez-Humble a patch to a bug through to production, that led him to discuss this with the team. He had a few good approaches to help get some of our systems to be more, turnkey. But there was too much resistance to change and he left. Maybe I am more masochistic when it comes to tolerating slow and painful change. ...

After not one, not two, but three coats of wd40, I was able to budge this stubborn showerhead. I was working w/ ChatGPT to think through this. ChatGPT suggested something called a rubber strap wrench. I did end up going to two home depos and finding this, but it happened to not quite work with smaller diameter shower head stem I had. However, randomly I also thought to grab an interesting tight grip water proof glove set. And that is what ultimately, perhaps in combination with the wd40 action, gave me the opposing forces to finally get that showerhead to come up, with my crescent wrench. ...

Dusty!