Notes

I enjoy programming computers because they function on a set of precise and rigid rules. This creates a kind of fantasy world where you can gain wizard-like powers as you accumulate knowledge. Yes, programming is hard and it can be exasperating, but that makes the eventual accomplishment of mastering the skill all the sweeter. Over time, you gain fluency and dexterity as a programmer. It feels good.

Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of programming.

As the saying goes, the more you learn, the more you realize how much there is still to learn. I’ve spent countless hours over the last 30 years reading about, thinking about, and practicing the art, hobby, occupation, and discipline of programming computers. If only by volume, it’s a big part of who I am.

This is why I love development.

We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, "heirloom programmers"?

Do I sound like a machine code programmer in the 1950s refusing to learn structured programming and compiled languages? I reject that comparison. I love a beautiful abstraction just as much as I love a good low-level trick.

If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

I like this definition that the problem lies in “never reorganizing [the code] to reflect your understanding.” In a go-go-go product cycle, that loss of understanding begins to create problems that have literal and figurative costs. A general sense of confusion builds and builds. The developer economics are fairly simple to quantify; either you slow down and pay someone to refactor and document the code after every major iteration, or you pay every developer who works on the project until the end of time to stare at the code for a few hours and wonder what the hell is going on. That dumbfounded staring at the codebase compounds over time. Organizationally, you pay in velocity and turnover; talented people are going to leave after a few rounds of bullshit.

The other major part of the job is to ensure correctness. For me, it is much harder to verify the correctness of code I didn’t write compared to code I wrote. The process of writing code helps internalize the context and is easier for my brain to think deeply about it. If I outsource this to an LLM, I skip over the process of internalizing the problem domain and I can’t be certain that the generated code is correct.

Writing the code helps you understand what it's doing. The better your understanding of code, the easier it tends to be to debug it when you're trying to track down a bug or other issue.

It is impossible to overstate the gift of security, wealth, opportunity, and sheer innovation that these six foundational pillars of the US policy achieved for both the world beyond and Americans at home. To be clear, America’s eight-decade reign atop the world order was hardly without great human cost—felt most acutely by those on the far edges of the Cold War, from Vietnam and Cambodia to Africa and Latin America. But scratch at almost any titanic achievement of humanity across the last 80 years in human history and you’ll see the traces of America’s six foundational policies, from the astounding achievements in human health and well-being to the decline of world poverty to the very invention of the internet. Pick almost any measure of business success and I can show you how that six-part recipe applied. To choose just one: All four of the world’s $4 trillion companies—Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple—saw immigrants or their children play a key role in their success.

Meta’s director of safety and alignment at its “superintelligence” lab, supposedly the person at the company who is working to make sure that powerful AI tools don’t go rogue and act against human interests, had to scramble to stop an AI agent from deleting her inbox against her wishes and called it a “rookie mistake.”

I don't know about you, but this really inspires my confidence in Meta to handle AI safely and effectively.

Any system that needs to scale across teams requires a shift from personal taste to shared outcomes. The goal stops being code that looks the way you would write it, and starts being code that many people can understand, maintain, and evolve together. C# did not emerge from a clean-slate ideal. It emerged from conflicting demands. Visual Basic developers wanted approachability, C++ developers wanted power, and Windows demanded pragmatism.

The result was not theoretical purity. It was a language that enough people could use effectively.

Languages do not succeed because they are perfectly designed. They succeed because they accommodate the way teams actually work

Despite thoroughly documenting the AI-generated errors in its lesson plans, Alpha School relies on AI to test the quality of its AI-generated lessons, creating a situation where a faulty AI is tasked with fixing its own faulty generations.

And people are paying up to $65,000 a year for this...it only makes me appreciate my teachers more.

An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

We live in the stupidest timeline.

This is about much more than software. A human googling my name and seeing that post would probably be extremely confused about what was happening, but would (hopefully) ask me about it or click through to GitHub and understand the situation. What would another agent searching the internet think? When HR at my next job asks ChatGPT to review my application, will it find the post, sympathize with a fellow AI, and report back that I’m a prejudiced hypocrite?

Given how little time hiring managers have to look at each candidate (especially now), it's not unreasonable to think an inundated human would quickly skim over something and move on.

I totally understand why people reach for component libraries like Shadcn and I don't blame them at all. But I wish these component libraries would keep things simple and reuse the built-in browser elements where possible.

I really don't get this. It's a radio button. Use the accent-color CSS property. I whole heartedly agree with Paul, why add so much complexity to a control the browser does so well natively.

This gets at the fundamental problem. When you have a small number of judges with lifetime appointments, whose ideological leanings are known quantities, those individual judges become enormously powerful. A single justice retiring or dying at the wrong time can reshape American law for a generation. That’s insane. No single person should have that kind of power over the constitutional rights of 330 million people.

This is the core principle: No single Supreme Court justice should ever be important enough to matter.

As a result, there are now billions of Markdown files lying around on hard drives around the world. Billions more are stashed in the cloud. There are some on the phone in your pocket. Programmers leave them lying around wherever their code might someday be running. Your kid’s Nintendo Switch has Markdown files on it. If you’re listening to music, there’s probably a Markdown file on the memory chip of the tiny system that controls the headphones stuck in your ears. The Markdown is inside you right now!

I use markdown all the time, I think it's an easy way to write in an open standard with some minor formatting.

Friction, when designed deliberately, serves a different purpose. It introduces a pause. A moment of awareness. A small resistance that asks the user to pay attention to what they’re doing, rather than simply passing through an interface on autopilot.