Pretty incredible how the skills repo by @mattpocockuk is only 6 months old, and has more stars than the React one. We had to sit down and talk. Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
05:48 How Matt got into tech
10:14 How Matt got into open source
12:58 Joining Vercel
18:39 Total TypeScript
23:21 AI’s impact on technical education
30:32 Building reusable skills for AI coding agents
40:46 The “smart zone” vs the “dumb zone”
45:02 The wayfinder skill
47:52 Why agents excel at software engineering
50:54 “Leading words”
1:01:10 Learning the fundamentals
1:09:17 Local vs. cloud agents
1:12:36 Planning vs. course-correcting
1:18:13 TDD and agents
1:23:06 Living in the UK
1:24:21 Teaching: the human part
1:28:36 Advice for junior engineers
1:31:07 Gardeners and great engineers
1:34:01 Book recommendation
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Thanks for the convo @mattpocockuk!
I don’t review code written by agents. I measure things like test coverage, dependency structure, cyclomatic complexity, module sizes, mutation testing, etc.
Much can be inferred about the quality of the code from those metrics. The code itself I leave to the AI.
Humans are slow at code. To get productivity we humans need to disengage from code and manage from a higher level.