• I’ve been working this week on mongo replicasets and I’m very impressed with their resilience, particularly the use of an intelligent client in the driver to handle failover etc.
• As part of an initiative at work, I started playing with Amazon Q, initially asking it to generate some basic arcade games. First impression was to be impressed at the simple examples produced, while being aware of the challenge in getting precise results from a coding agent. Something I need to spend more time on.

Links

• An excellent post from Sean Goedecke, AI Interpretability is further along than I thought, talks about internals of language models – it was a useful reminder of why telling a chatbot that it’s an expert works.
• AI-assisted coding for teams that can’t get away with vibes (via Simon Willison) was a useful primer on large-scale coding with GenAI. A useful rule here was ‘what helps the human helps the AI’, including linting, CI/CD, documentation and clearly defined features. Some good examples around prompting, and how AIs are used to build the prompts to code from. The most interesting bit, and something I’d like to go back to, is the claim that the DRY principle is less useful when working with LLMs. This is a living document being maintained by nilenso, which I will have to keep an eye.
• Could HTTP 402 be the Future of the Web was a good speculative article about the need for micropayments and how charging AI crawlers could lead to that.
• Some excellent words of wisdom from Everything is Prioritization: “If you’re remote and still free frazzled, you’re not doing remote wrong. You’re just prioritizing availability over impact.” The article talks about the need to avoid tempting distractions: “The best teams aren’t full of geniuses. They’re full of people who keep their focus and say ‘no’ without having a breakdown”.
• I’ve long disliked the cargo cult metaphor, and this is deconstructed in The origin of the cargo cult metaphor, which points out a lot of the errors and miscomprehension in the popular understanding of actual cargo cults. “The cargo cult metaphor is best avoided”.
• Simon Willison’s Identify, solve, verify is a short piece on the role of the programmer in the era of GenAI. “The more time I spend using LLMs for code, the less I worry about my career”.
• The Elegance Question: What Makes Some Systems Just Work? set out some simple principles for building ‘elegant’ systems. This was thought-provoking, particularly around the question of why so many systems go against these principles.

Books

No time for reading this week – and I’ve been distracted by a non-tech book.