Dave Smith

Intelligent, Connected, Embedded @emporia_energy. Former @Google DevRel. @Android enthusiast. Recovering spark-chaser.

[Addy Osmani @addyosmani]

Whether agents feel like liberation or loss depends on which joy of engineering you lean on most: making, knowing, or mattering.

I've seen engineers say many conflicting things about agents: some are bubbling with excitement and for the first time ever, they feel like they're in an all-star lineup, while others mourn for the death of their craft, leaving them feeling hollow.

I'm someone who works with agents every day, so I understand these sentiments. Rather than take sides, my hope is that I help you understand this in a more nuanced way.

Too often we see two camps: people who love the joy of coding and people who love the joy of shipping. I think this is a gross oversimplification. Rather than asking you to pick a side, I want to ask you to reflect on the elements of your work that are the most nourishing to you.

I think most of us have three sources of joy in our work, which we interweave in multiple ways:

- The joy of making (or "flow"): the joy of molding things in our hand and feeling that sweet moment when it all clicks into place.

- The joy of knowing: the joy of having such a strong mental model of our systems that we sense where a bug will be just by glancing at files.

- The joy of mattering: the joy of knowing that you are the expert that it all relied on.

Agents affect each of these elements in subtly different ways, which is why this discussion can be so complicated (we're mourning for different losses, and we're arguing from different places).

The joy of making is easy to maintain. it just moves up a level. You're not shaping every line anymore. You're shaping the system or factory, in a loop fast enough that flow still happens. And when you miss the old flow, nothing stops you from writing the code yourself.

The joy of knowing is especially at risk of erosion, so it's important to pay attention to it. Sometimes you'll realize you're reaching for a design you should be able to conjure automatically, but your intuition comes up with nothing.

Picking an option from an agent's suggestions is a different skill than conjuring an idea in the first place. If you always pick and never conjure, the ability to conjure will erode. You can't direct something you don't even loosely understand. If you don't understand your own codebase, you're not directing an agent to do something, the agent is directing you.

You matter. Obsolescence does affect you, but, you, your judgment, and especially your need for judgment, has never been more important. You get to decide what problems to solve, and you get to bring your taste and judgment to the work you do. You get to take ownership of it, all of it, whatever ships.

That feeling of sadness isn't a sign of failure to adapt. Grief means that you're attached to something, and that it's natural to feel grief when you see your work changing in ways that feel unfamiliar.

Lean into the things that make your work yours, and work on them more.

[Chandu Thota @ChanduThota]

We are making Markdown files work natively across Google Drive and Docs.

You can now preview .md files in Drive, open them in Docs, edit them, comment on them, and collaborate without converting the file into a Google Doc!

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

@kaushikgopal I've had this exact same thought constantly over the past few months. Especially watching the tension grow between the vertically and horizontally integrated ecosystems. Feature by feature, you can see the battle lines being drawn.

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

Perhaps challenges on platforms like @LeetCode and @hackerrank will become the places where junior engineers internalize the understanding of code architecture and algorithms that they will no longer get through years of writing their own code in the AI era.

[rvivek @rvivek]

LeetCode is dying.

A candidate recently interviewed at 6 companies. 4 of them had completely ditched LeetCode.

Instead of inverting binary trees, they were asked to:
— Build features in a real codebase
— Use AI to navigate unfamiliar code
— Collaborate like actual coworkers

The 45-minute DSA grill is slowly coming to an end. This is the shift in modern software engineering hiring.

It is time to mirror the interview process with how you build.

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

https://t.co/5tM5QSajZx

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

The era of AI has given birth to a new wave of excuses around ownership and understanding. "I got it from StackOverflow" has been replaced by "Claude wrote that".
Artifacts need human owners. When something has your name on it, you must be able to explain or defend it.

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

It isn't just code either. The same is true for documentation (a favorite task for AI delegation). Own the outcome of the tools you are using to produce any artifact.

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

Somebody get this guy a Chromebook.

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

In 5 to 7 years, UIs will be generated/streamed from the cloud, pixel-by-pixel. Phones/etc. will literally just be useless bricks with screens, speakers, and input.

That said, UIs won't be as dynamic as people expect. Imagine a new UI each time... that'd be so hard to use!

[Undisclosed ₿ ✝️⚡ ∞ @BitcoinUndisc]

https://t.co/JbpW09UtDd

[I Am Devloper @iamdevloper]

Typescript is just JavaScript after it spent its gap year backpacking through Europe

[Google Open Source @GoogleOSS]

👋 Meet the first developer preview of the Pigweed SDK.

We're making it even easier to leverage Pigweed’s libraries to develop, debug, test, and deploy embedded C++ applications.

Get started with these sample apps and a comprehensive tutorial → https://t.co/TExM5F52mY

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

This week, I've started a new adventure with the Firmware Team at @emporia_energy! Looking forward to adding my expertise to their already impressive suite of home energy management devices.

[Kevin Naughton Jr. @KevinNaughtonJr]

software engineers adding JavaScript to everything

[Denver Nuggets @nuggets]

TOUGH 💪

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

@marcos_placona @waynepiekarski Every IoT demo should have a big red button 😁

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

Given my time spent with Android, I think it's really neat to see the Bluedroid stack being used as the default option on ESP32. I never would have thought you'd see that running on an MCU.

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

Benchmarking latency across common wireless links for MCUs by @electric_ui

I stumbled across this post today and found it really insightful for performance tuning tips, especially on ESP32. Great comparisons!

https://t.co/KOlrnkT22d

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

Seems like a pretty Groovy thing to do.

[Dave Smith @devunwired]

🤔

[Slashdot @slashdot]

Apple Releases Pkl, a Configuration-as-Code Language https://t.co/ZEt4tW0Uwm

[Denver Nuggets @nuggets]

HE IS HIM. GAME WINNER.