Richard Brown

Jaded old programmer

[Cindy Sridharan @copyconstruct]

I remember how much effort it took to commit some commands to muscle memory (tcpdump, lsof, nc, openssl, strace etc), and even then just a limited set of these.

and now to see agents blaze through a debugging session conjuring commands and spellings I didn’t even know existed 🤯

[Aaron Stannard @Aaronontheweb]

To be clear, it's not Gergley's take that is stupid - it's the people he's talking about, which included me for a long stretch this year

[Cindy Sridharan @copyconstruct]

In recent weeks, when it came to tricky bugs (a memory leak, a routing issue, a sharding bug), Claude’s initial analysis was almost always 100% wrong.

I had to give it multiple hypotheses, clues, ideas, suggestions for it to solve the bug.

When asked “so, what did you learn?”

[Simon Willison @simonw]

@shanselman I've been making sure my regular --help output can double as a skill, so you can just tell an agent "run shot-scraper video --help" and it will get everything it needs to know to use a tool https://t.co/NfRtrvplBf

[lauren @poteto]

btw if you're wondering how i shipped 1000 PRs this month, i wrote this post that goes into my journey of getting to this point

[Josh @joshmanders]

AI is gonna kill software engineering just like cryptocurrency killed cash.

[Dev Agrawal @devagrawal09]

Introducing: Specter

Supercharge Agentic Engineering with

- Typescript Framework for Specs that compile, execute, and scaffold your app
- Vertical Slices that can be built, tested, and operated independently

Agents can finally work on large complex codebases reliably

[chad fowler @chadfowler]

Awesome to seee more of this. This is like what I’ve been writing about on the regenerative software blog about The Phoenix Architecture and what ill speaking about next week at @ainativedev

https://t.co/hjAujJNL1f

[Sam Basu @samidip]

Pragmatic AI in .NET Show:
Clawing at AI Native .NET Apps with @Aaronontheweb -
https://t.co/QIGfU1pBII

[Gary Bernhardt @garybernhardt]

I see that "types and tests do the same thing" has once again reared its head, so here's Ideology again: https://t.co/4iCRhd2Vfq

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Anders Hejlsberg (@ahejlsberg) is a living legend: he created Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and TypeScript (and today TypeScript is the most-used programming language, globally, as per GitHub.)

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
02:48 How Anders got into programming
05:40 Building his first compiler
07:44 Turbo Pascal
12:25 Delphi
14:53 Joining Microsoft
19:41 Building C#
29:11 Async/await
34:01 The rise of JavaScript
37:52 Building TypeScript
42:58 How the TypeScript compiler works
48:30 JavaScript’s strengths and weaknesses
52:18 How Anders uses AI
56:03 What language features work well with AI
1:02:49 How software craftsmanship is changing
1:07:49 Performance and efficiency
1:09:29 Anders’ tool stack
1:11:30 A 30-year career at Microsoft
1:13:40 Book recommendation

Brought to you by:

@AntithesisHQ – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. https://t.co/AKYm4cctss

@WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. https://t.co/jhFNq3aFcF

@turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable. https://t.co/w9y67GsFZJ

Four things that stood out to me:

1. “10x better for 1/10th of the price” is a proven winner.

This is what Turbo Pascal did: it sold for $49.95 when competing compilers cost $500, and it was faster and more interactive than competitors’ products. Conveniently, the low price tag also killed off piracy

2. C# might have not existed without a famous court case.

Microsoft originally hired Anders to architect its Java tools (Visual J++), but the Sun versus Microsoft lawsuit (1997-2001) meant Microsoft could not build on top of Java, as the company that owned Java’s IP (Sun) sued MS for alleged unauthorized changes to the Java language. Microsoft realized it had to build a new language that combined VB’s productivity with C++’s power. This led to C# and .NET.

3. TypeScript exists because Anders refused to build Script# for the Outlook .com team.

Microsoft’s Outlook .com team asked Anders’ C# team to productize “ScriptSharp,” a language to cross-compile C# to JavaScript. Anders and the C# team pushed back, suggesting that a better approach was to fix JavaScript. Anders felt strongly that to be attractive to the best-of-breed developers in the JavaScript ecosystem, you want people to write JavaScript, and not another language like C#.

4. Designing a programming language is a 10-year play.

As Anders puts it: “Version one is great, but has all sorts of issues. You’ve got to do version two, but it’s not until version three that it really starts to be great. Then you’ve got to convince people to adopt it.”

[Pavel Osadchuk @xakpc]

This blog post is criminally underrated.
More people need to read it

Also I definitely remember there was episode about it in family guy

[Damian Płaza @raimeyuu]

Greta blog post from @Aaronontheweb

It reminds me an evegreen question: what is the goal?

Burning tokens?
Producing software?
Softwaremaxxing?

"Distribution is more important than production"

https://t.co/l0nvdAl7vg

[Cindy Sridharan @copyconstruct]

This is one of all time favorite books on programming, and it goes way harder during this agentic era.

My myriad review agents follow many guidelines from this book.

The bar for software really should be higher, and it’s sad to see people ship slop.

[Uncle Bob Martin @unclebobmartin]

You can now play missile command on https://t.co/fOEH4mWSas

[Aaron Stannard @Aaronontheweb]

So I'm done with worrying about keeping agents busy or tokenmaxxing. There's no cheat codes for building a viable business, only the ceaseless hard work.

[shirish @shiri_shh]

running Kimi K3 locally is easy. you just need:

- 1.5 TB of GPU memory
- roughly 8 H100s
- a small power substation

[James Long @jlongster]

@dillon_mulroy

[Grady Booch @Grady_Booch]

The burning of the Library of Alexandria v2

[Richard Brown @FlukeFan]

This is why I rely on my "Kindle Legacy".

Best way to read books IMHO.

[Aaron Stannard @Aaronontheweb]

AI-generated meme videos are still going to do great, but I just don't see people spending hours watching AI-generated TV shows and films.

Amazon's even having to limit the number of AI-generated Kindle book submissions because they're shitting up the store: https://t.co/xg2HhNOA0g