Insights for great software & great teams

Friday afternoon hot take (after a couple months of engineering exclusively with coding agents):

Context/prompting is a crutch that will only get you so far.

The AI agent does not have a true understanding of both:

• The business logic that the code it is generating represents
• The wider system(s) that it is being written to run within

IOW the why of the code.

The result is that no matter how hard you try it is not able to consistently apply rules and/or conventions (eg: logically organizing/co-locating code).

TIL you can use redirect.github.com in links to avoid a back reference being created on github from commits, comments, PRs, etc.

Test-driven development is to programming what double-entry bookkeeping is to accounting.

The fundamental character flaw of the software creator is not the misguided belief that they can solve any problem with software. Instead, it is the belief they can understand how their own software works before they create it.

We may need a SaaS appendix for Zawinski's law:

Any SaaS platform attempts to expand until it is a social network.

Wow, 1 month for a rewrite seems a little aggressive.