24 pages

Soapbox

Opinion and argument. Where I plant a flag on something and defend it.

The commit message was the whole instrument panel

I asked an agent to diagnose a failing pipeline and leave it broken. It fixed it, then wrote a commit message about something it hadn't done, which bothered me a lot more than the fix.

My best finding came from the model I trust least

I sent a research agent off to back up something I'd been saying out loud for weeks. It handed me the evidence against it instead, and it wasn't the first time that model had done it to me.

A comment is for a different reader

The tool had comments on under ten per cent of its lines and ninety pages of documentation built into the binary, and I'd argue that was one decision made for two very different readers.

Blameless doesn't mean nobody messed up

Blameless was meant to make it safe to tell the truth. Somewhere along the way it started to mean nobody did anything, and I'd quite like the first one back.

The hero gets the bill

AI found a 22-year-old way to own most of the PHP web, and the fix shipped in a day. The bill for being rescued is still landing, and it isn't addressed to the hero.

Nothing in the room can take it personally

Reviewers in a group agree more than they should, and I don't think it's anybody's fault. So I've started building review panels out of things that have never been in a room.

The day a script needs changing everywhere

Eleven variants of one shell script, on hundreds of laptops, launching pods into production. The language was never the problem, and it wasn't the fix either.

Two encrypted emails in twenty years

One of them was from me, testing it. I'd still publish the key, and the reason isn't cryptographic.

Building it yourself is the third thing I try

I built somebody else's idea into a working skill before nine and deleted it by ten. Not-invented-here is the accusation; here's the order I actually work in.

A Slack channel with nobody in it

I asked nine agent sessions to stop compiling for forty minutes. What came back read like a team of colleagues, and I haven't worked out what to do about that.