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Chiron Codex: helping software engineers become centaurs. APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: AI
Opinionated Read: How AI Impacts Skill Formation
The abstract to this preprint, by two authors both associated with Anthropic, makes the claim “We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding … Continue reading
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Creating “sub-agents” with Mistral Vibe
The vibe coding assistant doesn’t have the same idea of sub-agents that Claude Code does, but you can create them yourself—more or less—from the pieces it supplies. [UPDATE: vibe 2.0 supports subagents directly.] Write the prompt for the sub-agent in … Continue reading
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Announcing Chiron Codex, a community of software centaurs
Software engineers don’t need to outsource our agency to coding agents. We don’t need to give up reading the code, or understanding the problems. We can use AI tools to augment our own capabilities, to improve our engineering knowledge and … Continue reading
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Management is the wrong analogy for LLM augmentation
A common meme at the moment in AI-augmented coding circles is “we are all managers now”, with people expressing the idea that alongside actual programming, programmers now manage their team of agents. This is a poor analogy, in both directions. … Continue reading
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Is spec-driven development the end of Agile software development?
A claim that I’ve seen on software social media is that spec-driven development is evidence that agile was a dark path, poorly chosen. The argument goes that Agile software development is about eschewing detailed designs and specifications, in favour of experimentation and … Continue reading
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On the value of old principles
People using AI coding assistants typically wrestle with three problems (assuming they know what they’re trying to get the model to do, and that that’s the correct thing to try to get it to do): (It’s important to bear in … Continue reading
Posted in AI, design, OOP
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Vibe coding and BASIC
In Vibe Coding: What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing (Sorry, Linus), The Register makes a comparison between vibe coding today and the BASIC programming of the first generation of home microcomputers: In one respect, though, vibe coding does have … Continue reading
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Essence and accident in language model-assisted coding
In 1986, Fred Brooks posited that there was “no silver bullet” in software engineering—no tool or process that would yield an order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity. He based this assertion on the division of complexity into that which is essential to … Continue reading
Posted in AI, software-engineering, tool-support
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LLMs and reinforcement learning
My reflection on the Richard Sutton interview with Dwarkesh Patel was that it was interesting how much the two participants talk past each other, and fail to find common ground. Particularly that they couldn’t agree on the power of reinforcement learning, when … Continue reading
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Prompting software or supporting engineering
As we learn to operate these new generative predictive transformers, those of us in the world of software need to work out what we’re doing it for. The way in which we use them, the results we get—and the direction … Continue reading
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