Justin Morris 🦅

👨🏼‍💻 & 🚵🏼‍♂️ mostly. Currently building infra at @up_banking. Previously @buildkite & @conversationedu. Spicy water is my jam.

@[email protected]

[Lee Robinson @leerob]

You might believe you should spend less time thinking about code because of AI.

I strongly disagree! We’re watching this play out live where tons of AI generated code becomes a liability.

At the end of the day, an engineer needs to be responsible / on call for code that gets shipped to production. If you don’t understand the system you’re trying to debug, you’re probably going to have a bad time.

Yes, AI can help with all of this, if you set up the proper systems. You can have agents triage prod logs, look at errors, etc. You can speed up parts of the investigation, but an engineer needs to make the call. There might be serious customer or financial implications from that change.

I expect the trend continue for trimming dependencies, vendoring code so you can modify it directly, preferring simpler systems with fewer abstractions, and spending waaaay more time thinking about system design and code maintenance.

I’ve said this before, but it’s a great time to get familiar with CS fundamentals and some of the history behind what great software looks like. Many parts will be different in the coming years as AI progresses, but also a lot more than people realize will stay the same.

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

@lox Neat! Have been keeping an eye on clean room—keen to take it for a spin

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

@Annie_Shea This is really cool, Anne! 😱😍

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

@nateberkopec Fantastic, many thanks!

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

@markbrown4 A motto to live by

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

@taybenlor well, goddamnit now i’m 2:15 in and committed

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

oh well, @[email protected] I suppose 🤷‍♂️

[Zoos Victoria @ZoosVictoria]

That tiny trunk 😍

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

@johnbarton @lachlanhardy @chendo @freshtonic yeah, would be pretty incredible for a lot of plumbing a bunch of data around for various little tasks and occasionally slapping a quick UI on top...pretty impressive

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

Holy hell https://t.co/ybfVaGCy8l looks impressive! :O

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

@chendo @freshtonic Yeah, makes sense!

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

@climbingcyclist Sorry to hear that, Matt 😞

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

The dream

[Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン @rakyll]

My current dream is to build a profitable company with 10 people and keep the number there.

[alex norris @sillyalexnorris]

needy

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

@morrisjeanette File an insurance claim? Maybe they’ll compensate me for my time? Doubt it. 🤷‍♂️

[Justin Morris 🦅 @plasticine]

How you know the neighbour’s pool build next door is going just great