/Thought Piece

The Rise Of The AI Engineer

tl;dr: “Every startup I know of has some kind of discuss-ai Slack channel. Those channels will turn from informal groups into formal teams, as Amplitude, Replit and Notion have done. The thousands of Software Engineers working on productionizing AI APIs and OSS models, whether on company time or on nights and weekends, in corporate Slacks or indie Discords, will professionalize and converge on a title - the AI Engineer. This will be the highest-demand eng job of the decade.”

featured in #428

Plain Text Journaling

tl;dr: “I cobbled together a journaling system with {neo,}vim, coreutils and dateutils. This system is loosely based on Ryder Caroll’s Bullet Journal method.” The author gives us a demo.

featured in #424

Tech Debt Metaphor Maximalism

- Avery Pennarun tl;dr: Tech debt is compared to financial debt in a blog post, highlighting the distinction between high-interest shortcuts and low-interest strategic decisions, while emphasizing the importance of managing debt within defined limits and evaluating its impact on the project's sustainability.

featured in #421

AI Means More Developers

- Matt Rickard tl;dr: “Software trends towards higher abstractions. You can do more with less. Not only do developers never need to touch hardware anymore, but they might not even need to interface with public cloud providers and might opt to use developer-friendly middlemen. That means less code to write. Less code to write means a narrower range of skills needed to get started. This lowers the barrier to entry.”

featured in #421

All The Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About When Building Products With LLMs

- Phillip Carter tl;dr: (1) Context windows are a challenge with no complete solution. (2) LLMs are slow and chaining is a nonstarter. (3) Prompt engineering is weird and has few best practices. (4) Correctness and usefulness can be at odds. (5) Prompt injection is an unsolved problem.

featured in #418

Lua: The Little Language That Could

- Matt Blewitt tl;dr: “Lua is probably my favourite “little language” — a language designed to have low cognitive load, and be easy to learn and use. It’s embedded in a lot of software, such as Redis. It’s also used as a scripting language in games such as World of Warcraft and Roblox via Luau. This post is a brief love letter to the language, with some examples of why I like it so much.”

featured in #418

The Case Against Relying Solely On DRY

- Ashley Peacock tl;dr: Instead of being applied when needed, Ashley believes DRY is thrown around anytime duplication is spotted, and this leads to worse code in the long run. Ashley walks through why duplication is not the root of all evil, and why it’s perfectly fine to repeat yourself sometimes.

featured in #398

No-Code Has No Future In A World Of AI

- Ravi Parikh tl;dr: Ravi Parikh, CEO of Airplane, discusses how AI-driven software development will dwarf no-code tools' capabilities and eventually make no-code obsolete.

featured in #394

I’m Now A Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer

- Filippo Valsorda tl;dr: "I now have six amazing clients, and I’m making an amount of money equivalent to my Google total compensation package, which proves the thesis that it’s possible to be a professional maintainer earning rates competitive with the adjacent market for senior software engineers... I’m sharing details about my progress to hopefully popularize the model, and eventually help other maintainers adopt it, although I’m not quite ready to recommend anyone else drop everything to try this just yet."

featured in #387

Ordering Numbers, How Hard Can It Be?

- Orson Peters tl;dr: "From challenging a variety of people to write a correct implementation of is\_less\_eq, no one gets it right on their first try. And that’s after already explicitly being told that the challenge is to do it correctly for all inputs. I quote the Python standard library: “comparison is pretty much a nightmare.”"

featured in #385