Is it then hypocritical of me to go on about how I code with AI? What's the difference? (Mulls this one over)

Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?

Absolutely experiencing the AI ick when reading any article or blog post that was generated with AI. If this was your newsletter, I'm sorry but that's an auto unsubscribe from me. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/m...

Needs very small checkpoints here and there. Needs tons of context and checking in. Not unlike a human.

Can't be afraid to throw away work and start over if it's not working. You still need, as an engineer, mastery of the craft and a vision for what you're building toward. AI won't solve that!

Last week was Week 1 of setting Claude Code loose on some Wejoinin errands: having some aha moments about agentic cognitive offloading. Definitely feels like I can accomplish more, but it feels a loose cannon. Bulky, unwieldy, verbose, and sometimes surprisingly effective.

Tons of babysitting.

Writing is thinking. I don't think I'm going to pass that off to an AI. I need to work this out by putting words to paper.

Oops, forgot to say! This week I imported all my tweets from Twitter over here (thanks @en.blueark.app). Then nuked the Twitter account. I'll be primarily on Bluesky from now on!

Scariest night I've had in a very long time, trying to figure out when or where we will have to evacuate. Grateful to firefighters and other first responders for being out there. #eatonfire

2025's goals are to create more:

🎵 Music
✍🏼 Blogging
📀 Side projects

Taking a solid 2 week break over the holidays was so refreshing. It's been a while since I truly got work off the brain. I felt creative for the first time in a long time!

I'd listen! I have no idea how other parents make all the other parts of their lives fit.

Managing Expand Projects So if “the exploration that cannot fail is not an exploration”, then how are you supposed to manage high-risk, high-consequence projects?

Non-sequitur "an exploratory project that can't fail" with me the other day. But managing projects in a rapidly expanding product is a whole different deal than managing exploration. Here's how I think about handling the risks of runaway growth: tidyfirst.substack.com/p/managing-e...

Thanks for doing the good work Rich!

This is (in my opinion) one of the most important pieces of empirical research to come out about generative AI’s actual/likely effects on politics.

@shelbygrossman.bsky.social and team are right to warn that AI built to parrot back our beliefs to us can be an effective vehicle for propaganda.

my mom named her kid (me) “蓝天” which means bluesky in chinese, so i called myself “jay” to become a bird instead, and then some birdapp company named their project “bluesky” and i ended up running it.

Working at Google has taught me a couple of important things, both true:
- The power of written, debated, principled thinking to make guiding product decisions 🏛️
- The demotivating power of a large bureacracy 😭

I love data scientists. They are amazing. That is all.

a bingo card with * WTF is detached HEAD state * I hate git * git's design is so elegant * I've used git for 10 years and I have no idea how it works * commits are immutable snapshots * just use magit * git is a directed acyclic graph * you have to understand the linux kernel dev workflow * mercurial is better * git is not github * subversion was so much worse * I only know 5 commands * a branch is just a pointer to a commit * the CLI is badly designed * you should just read Pro Git * rewriting history is bad * just spend 15 minutes learning git's internals * something about "porcelain" * merge sucks, only use rebase * rebase sucks, only use merge * I just do not care how git works * content addressed storage * subversion was better * something about Linus Torvalds * I just delete my git repo if I mess it up

git discussion bingo card

Congrats you two!!

Tried Threads and Mastodon. Tryna be active on Bluesky too. Will probably spread some engagement across all three in the next few months - we'll see how this goes!

Much love to friends and former coworkers affected by layoffs @lyft. I know some really, really great people and would be happy to help. DMs are open!

@mybluewristband shares how she took initiative to shape process where she was at to take control of her own career growth as she grew into eng management. “If I can do it, you can too!” #leaddevsanfrancisco

You Can Write Devastatingly Effective Docs - Barbara Mint... Uh-oh, you wrote another meandering doc where your review...

week!

speakerdeck.com/andrewhao/you-can-write-...

🎨 Slides for my talk are up! It was so fun talking about effective writing with the Pyramid Principle with y'all at #LeadDevSanFrancisco! I'll post some more thoughts later this...

Loved @plumertzi’s talk on the UX of incident management at #leaddevsanfrancisco. Moving from a fixed set of heroes to a truly distributed on-call model takes work!

Upcoming events Join us throughout 2024 for inspiring conferences, worksh...

Will you be at @TheLeadDev San Francisco next week? I'm excited to be sharing about the One Cool Trick you can use to write Devastatingly Effective Docs™️. It's not too late to sign up - hope to see you there! https://leaddev.com/leaddev-san-francisco

Never play Battleship against a kid who can’t count

One thing I'll never forgive Google engineers for is their habit of choosing clever, cutesy, horribly opaque names for EVERYTHING

It doesn't matter how "senior" you are or whether you're familiar with the solution space. Just taking time to slow down and write things down makes you orders of magnitude more effective as an engineer - and helps your teammates help you! 3/

It never fails to impress me when someone on the team shows me their notes. It has:

- A list of observations of what they see. Links to logs, console output, etc.
- A list of hypotheses to what they think the problem is
- Thoughts on how they might test those hypotheses. 2/

Early-career engineers - one superpower that can set you apart is honing a systematic approach to hairy problems. The scientific method! 1/