Sharing Theories with Agents
Get in sync with your agents on what you’re really building. Fabulous tool included
Software Development
Verum Factum and the Creator’s Confidence
Verum Factum: we only really know what we made.
Dang, I know that feeling with software! And I miss it, now that AI is doing the coding.
But sometimes I still get it…
Communication is hard, but sometimes I can fix it.
When coding with an agent gets tricky, use the agent to make it less tricky.
Adding Correctness Conditions to Code Changes
Today I looked at the first PR on our new project repo. It added a new run script, but the README didn’t mention it. The proposed change was incomplete, because the documentation was out of sync. Did I comment on the PR? heck no. I want to fix this problem for all PRs, not just …
Speak So They Can Hear You
“My manager needs to put an ROI on everything,” an SRE leader told me at KubeCon this week. Yeah, I feel that. We know the value of SRE, smoothing all other work so that production can produce. Putting that into dollars though? It’s hard to count the cut costs of incidents that didn’t happen. Yet …
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 …
Augmented Coding: Better with Principles
Today I opened the AWS console in order to transcribe a video, and I could not be bothered to do all that clicking. This has to be six lines in the terminal. I don’t know the six lines, but Claude does. Claude “automated the entire Amazon Transcribe workflow” in 300 lines of dependency checking, argument …
Augmented Coding: an Experience Report
Last weekend I sat down with augmentcode.com to do some serious AI-assisted coding. The agent, “Auggie,” promises to automate coding tasks to a level I haven’t tried before. Gotta say, it was pretty good. I got farther than I would have alone. But hoooo, it is a new kind of effort and frustration. Overall impression: …
Software development is…
There is something puzzling about software development. It doesn’t work like many tasks, it doesn’t break down the same way. It feels strangely personal, like there’s a connection between the code and the coder, or else it goes brittle. Today I learned a word for this! Ursula Franklin was a physicist, among other things, and …