Sharing Theories with Agents
Get in sync with your agents on what you’re really building. Fabulous tool included
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Who are we Now?
This is based on my keynote at RubyConf 2026. Video, references There’s a philosopher in Naples, Italy, way back in the 1700s who understood something important to software today. Giambattista Vico lived early in the Enlightenment, when mathematical and experimental thinking were all the rage. René Des Cartes and Francis Bacon were the hotness. People …
What is it like to be you?
This is what I want to know when I get to know someone. What is the experience of being alive in your body, in your world? This is the definition of consciousness: there is something it is like to be you. Erik Hoel contrasts this with LLMs, speculating there is nothing it is like to …
Span or Attribute? in OpenTelemetry custom instrumentation
Instead of emitting a log, add attributes to the current span. OpenTelemetry makes this easy, and Honeycomb makes it free. This gets you more data correlation.
Communication is hard, but sometimes I can fix it.
When coding with an agent gets tricky, use the agent to make it less tricky.
What is special about MCP?
three things MCP can do, and an infinite number of things it can’t do (all of which make it great) AI agents can interact with the world using tools. Those tools can be generic or specific. Generic Run a bash command Operate a web browser Execute a SQL query Specific See my Google Calendar events …
When efficiency isn’t wasteful
Efficiency means doing the same thing with fewer resources. In software, efficient code is faster, because that uses less compute. If some other software is waiting on yours to return, then your speed is saving upstream compute. Efficient data uses less space, which means less network bandwidth to move it around. All this is very …
The world is terrible and great
Not only can things be otherwise, they already are, and it is a matter of tuning, tending, activating, connecting, and defending these processes of change that are already in the making. Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, Joyful Militancy Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2025. The system is broken, it is getting worse, and …
Productivity v Impact
Here’s a familiar 2×2, the Important & Urgent quadrants: Very early in my career, I was taught to beware the “Not Important & Urgent” quadrant. I’m used to working in the “Important & Urgent” quadrant most of the time, getting the important stuff done just on time. This is the quadrant of productivity. A friend …
I can write the code. Getting something done is another matter.
a keynote from CppNorth This one is about everything else that a team needs to accomplish, besides writing the code, in order to provide useful capabilities to people.