#software-engineering
Wiki 31
- AI Didn't Make Programming Easier. It Just Made It Differently Difficult Osborn's CACM piece grounding the AI-coding shift in memory research — the burden moves from recall to judgment, and judgment is harder to build than recall was
- andrea-laforgia-blog Andrea Laforgia's substack (a4al6a.substack.com) — evidence-driven essays on software engineering practice and continuous delivery
- billjings.com Bill Jings's writing — software engineering practice, version control, async development workflows, tooling critique
- Claude Is Not a Compiler Bleecher Snyder retires the compiler analogy — an agent's value is working vertically across layers, demonstrated by building exe.dev's distributed DNS server in a week
- Code Review as a Principal-Agent Problem Why review-then-commit relied on cheaply-inferable effort signals from contributors; how agents collapse that signal and what it means for review processes
- code-review-knowledge-transfer Empirical finding that <15% of code review comments are about bugs — review's primary value is knowledge transfer, awareness, and alternative solutions, not defect detection
- Differential spec analysis Build the same system with several independent agent loops, diff the finished implementations, and treat every divergence as a decision nobody specified
- Don't Call Yourself an Artisanal Programmer purplesyringa argues the "artisanal" label hands the word engineer to AI users, and proposes "AI-free software engineering" instead
- Fred Brooks Author of The Mythical Man-Month and No Silver Bullet; Turing Award 1999
- Greg Wilson (third-bit.com) Greg Wilson's blog — empirical software engineering and research methods, skeptical of unmeasured claims about AI-assisted coding
- How Do We Stop Vibe Coding? Alex Klos surveys spec tooling and argues vibe coding needs trust machinery rather than discipline
- In Defense of Not Understanding Your Codebase Goedecke's case that partial understanding is the honest baseline in large systems, and one engineering value traded against others
- Individual Engineer Agency The gap between individual engineering quality and product-level user perception
- Leverage Code Review for Sustainable AI Coding Development CACM news piece where practitioners say review of AI code shifts from end gate to continuous risk check aimed at assumptions, trust boundaries, evidence
- Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code Rachel Laycock on moving review's jobs earlier into pairing, design sessions and automation, keeping human code review for the exceptions
- My AI-Assisted Workflow Barbero's seven-step workflow where planning happens before code and AI stress-tests thinking rather than replacing it
- No Silver Bullet Brooks' 1986 essay on essential vs accidental difficulty and why no 10x productivity gain exists
- pair-programming Two developers working the same code at the same time — peer-reviewed evidence of comparable quality at equivalent cost to solo+review, strongest benefit on complex tasks and for junior developers
- Programming as Theory Building Naur's 1985 thesis that the primary product of programming is the team's shared mental model; code, docs, and tests are artifacts in service of that theory
- Recall-to-judgment shift AI moves programming's cognitive burden from retrieving syntax and patterns to evaluating whether generated output is correct and appropriate — relocation, not reduction
- Sean Goedecke's Blog Sean Goedecke's blog at seangoedecke.com — staff engineer essays on LLMs, careers, and the inside view of working at GitHub and Zendesk
- ship-show-ask Wilsenach's three-way classification of changes — Ship (merge directly), Show (merge then review), Ask (open PR and wait) — that reduces the proportion of work needing blocking review
- Software Engineering Is About Managing Complexity (hack8s) hack8s.com on why cheap AI-generated code makes engineering judgment and real ownership of a codebase scarcer instead of less needed
- Stop Using Pull Requests Laforgia's evidence synthesis against PRs as default workflow — origin-story category error, <15% of comments are about bugs, 86-99% of lead time is waiting, T*D as the alternative
- Supply Chain Security Protecting code-to-artifact chain: CI/CD, dependencies, registries, releases, defense patterns
- The Agent Principal-Agent Problem Crawshaw on how agents broke code review by collapsing the effort signal between contributor and reviewer; the small-team escape and the big-co dead end
- trunk-based-development All developers integrate to a single mainline at least daily, in small batches, with feature flags managing incomplete work — the DORA-correlated practice that replaces long-lived feature branches
- Vibe-engineering Using an agent to accelerate your own decision-making across every layer of a system, rather than delegating the decisions — the line that separates it from vibe-coding
- We Are Not Special Hillel Wayne interviewed crossover engineers and found almost everything software thinks is unique isn't
- Working on Products People Hate Why individual engineers have limited control over product perception, and why that's okay
- You Should Read "Programming as Theory Building" CodeUtopia on Naur's 1985 essay; programming is building a shared mental theory of the program, with code, docs, and tests as artifacts of that theory
Sources 1
- No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accident in Software Engineering No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accident in Software Engineering