Scott Cowan

Software Engineer

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

As we start to run into guardrails with cloud models this is viable for striping intent from their context

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

@ICooper I switched to the opus model with high effort this week so maybe it all evened out

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

OpenClaw reminds me of the Mint app where you had to give it your bank login to export your spending habits. It’s great but the risk is too high to let it send email.

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

@dhh The UK and others tends to outsource to Eastern Europe for engineering and keep sales domestic that’s why the salaries are depressed.

Lots of opportunities to pick up the pieces from that arrangement but they expect that on the cheap too

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

An engineer being the copilot to AI agents or coding tools is a better concept than AI as a standalone employee. I future without makers seems unlikely

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

Yes and horizontal specialisation is less in demand. Vertical stack specialisation is the future eg: (web, mobile, embedded, data)

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

"Hiring pure backend engineer and expecting them to do non backend stuff IMO is wrong"

Sigh.

Any capable intern/new grad picks up whatever new technology is needed to get the job done.

If you, as an *experienced* engineer, refuse to do so: you're less capable than an intern

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

My latest trick is to write a one liner for a story, generate code and test and then generate the full story based on your changeset

[Soumith Chintala @soumithchintala]

i'm comically impressed that people are coping on deepseek by spewing bizarre conspiracy theories -- despite deepseek open-sourcing and writing some of the most detail oriented papers ever.
read. replicate. compete.
don't be salty, just makes you look incompetent.

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

@dhh You find the time for kids as the lower priority activities melt away… like sleep 😅

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

I spent ages trying to get an aws_alb_listener with SSL to work without a custom domain but looks like I need one.

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

@ICooper It surprised me that that there was still interesting papers from the 60s it must be the same with younger people and the 90s but that set the tone for the modern software

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

@jeremydmiller Looking back at my consulting gigs it was 2004-2011 on SVN before seeing Git client sites. Personally I switched after GitHub launched in 2008, that was a game changer

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

@ICooper Rabbit R1 heavily used playwright to create integrations with Spotify and doordash. But as expected that was constantly breaking. We’re going to see a rise of BE for AI patterns aka formatting for RAG

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

@ICooper At least books have references so you can find your way back to Carnegie Mellon white papers from the last century

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

@serialseb It’s like Dollar shave club but lame

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

@shanselman Try again in two years, I’ve been meaning to drop back into cyberpunk and no man’s sky

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

@ICooper Wow that is a tome and it's also to the point. I'm going to put something together something about the flavours of "AI" implementations, they just get muddled together

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

I’ve been using Prodigy - Invaders Must Die to focus while coding for the last 15 years and I still think of it as their new stuff

[Scott Cowan @scottcowan]

AWS CodeCommit is being deprecated and as of an hour ago it’s labelled as Keep The Lights On https://t.co/zo2BPeW39T