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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
On working machines
In part one, on thinking machines, I explored two facets of the philosophy of artificial intelligence: “intelligence”, and consciousness. That left an important topic to consider for this post: the impact of artificial intelligence on work. No technology has ever … Continue reading
Posted in AI, economics
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Chiron Codex early bird ends soon
Early bird pricing for Chiron Codex ends soon! Join our community of AI-augmented software engineering centaurs now to lock in early access to public content, as well as exclusive videos, book and journal reviews, and more. Ends March 27.
Posted in advancement of the self, AI
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On thinking machines
While Chiron Codex is about the application of LLMs and AI-augmented tools, we also need to understand their meaning to us, each other, and society. I have three topics: intelligence, consciousness, and work: in this part I’ll deal with the first two. Continue reading
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
Posted in AI
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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
Posted in AI
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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
Posted in AI, tool-support
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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
Posted in agile, AI
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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
Posted in AI, history
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