This is a good rant, I liked it. Lots of very good points in there of course. Again: the area where it's useful is very narrow. I also nails down the consequences of a profession going full in with those tools.

Somehow not surprising... There's an area where it works OK. That said, I think we don't have the right UX to exploit it safely and productively. The right practices still need to be found. This isn't helped by all the hype and crazy announcements.

You can't be in the backseat when using those tools. Otherwise you might feel productive by cranking out code but it can't do the essential tasks for you (most notably actual problem solving or architecture thinking). The quality would clearly suffer.

Such contributions still don't exist. Or their quality is so abyssal that they waste everyone's time. Don't fall for the marketing speak.

We often hear that question about the trade off between quality and cost. The question is badly framed though. If it's low quality it's requires more effort to add or change features... and so it's more expensive mid-term (not even long term).

Nice post. Explains well why the answer is not a number to target. You want to impact the distribution.

Interesting thinking around a portfolio of activities. You can prioritise differently within it to manage quality vs speed of delivery over time.

Struggling with making your first technical roadmap? Driving it from measurable problems is a good first step.

This is accurate in my opinion. Engineering and product teams need to properly negotiate, otherwise quality will suffer.

When I read the content of this article I wonder how useful the metrics really were. I mean clearly they helped the team realize which changes to bring... but the practice changes were all somewhat conventional in a way. You go a long way when you focus on quality and create the space for it.

This is clearly not a great outcome. The browser monoculture probably doesn't help.

He is spot on again. The scope is what will allow to create flexibility in a fixed price project. This is what leads to the necessity to work incrementally.

Maybe we could store metrics about the code in the history as well? This would indeed reduce vendor lock-in. This tool makes it easy. Unsurprisingly seems built upon git notes.

Interesting musing about the "software crisis" which was declared in the late 60s. We're coping with it by piling levels of abstractions but clearly we're still not out of it. Our craft still needs to grow.

Good reminder that those two aspects are not necessarily competing which each other. In the long run quality improves productivity. In the short term it might as well.

No, your model won't get smarter just by throwing more training data at it... on the contrary.

Definitely a good idea, we'd need several such institutes across the world. Would governments be willing to try this?

Interesting study on the impact generative AI can have on people performances in business settings. There are a few nuggets in there. In particular anything related to problem solving people do worse with generative AI tools than without. And even worse than that when they've been trained (probably due to overconfidence). The place where it seems to help is for more creativity related tasks... at the individual level, but at the collective level creativity decreases due to homogenization. Definitely things to keep in mind.

Indeed, don't mindlessly add tests. I find interesting that the doubts raised in this piece are once again concluded using an old quote of Kent Beck. What he was proposing was fine and then over time people became clearly unreasonable.

Something is definitely bonkers regarding the use of JavaScript on the web. The amount of bloat is staggering.