Toots from 2026-04-07#
“This research reframes how engineering leaders should think about the cost of agentic developmen…#
“This research reframes how engineering leaders should think about the cost of agentic development tools. The expense isn’t in getting an AI to write code — that’s the cheap part. The real cost is in the back-and-forth of review, verification, and refinement, where agents repeatedly pass full contexts to each other.”
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“We want our Platform Team to be about outcomes - but we are hamstringing them from the beginning…#
“We want our Platform Team to be about outcomes - but we are hamstringing them from the beginning by calling the Platform Team in the first place, and worse could follow by codifying “Platform Engineering” as a thing.
Naming things is important. For a team inside an organisation, it can change how you are viewed, and what people expect you to be able to offer. For people in the team itself, it’s one of the simpler ways you can help set direction - rightly or wrong.”
https://samnewman.io/blog/2023/02/08/dont-call-it-a-platform/?__readwiseLocation=
Mastodon Source 🐘#
Two quotes that I’m reminded of reading testimonials about AI-fueled increases in code volume wit…#
Two quotes that I’m reminded of reading testimonials about AI-fueled increases in code volume without regard to outcomes:
Drucker: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently something that should not have been done at all”
Deming: “A bad system will beat a good person every time”
Mastodon Source 🐘#
Science fiction movie plot: team of talented people on a space mission see Earth destroyed Today…#
Science fiction movie plot: team of talented people on a space mission see Earth destroyed
Today’s news: …
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“It’s more like property testing than unit testing. We aren’t hard-coding “every feature …#
“It’s more like property testing than unit testing. We aren’t hard-coding “every feature should update the README.” We’re stating a property: the documentation should be up-to-date after every feature change.”
https://jessitron.com/2026/04/06/adding-correctness-conditions-to-code-changes/
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“AI video generation tools like Sora assumed that the barrier to video creation was technical: …#
“AI video generation tools like Sora assumed that the barrier to video creation was technical: if only everyone could generate video from a text prompt, everyone would. What they failed to grasp is that the barrier was never technical. It was creative.”
https://kaptur.co/sora-a-solution-without-a-problem/
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“Again, these are eight assumptions that every distributed system developer makes at some point…#
“Again, these are eight assumptions that every distributed system developer makes at some point in their life, and any one of these assumptions usually ends up creating painful scenarios when the assumption is proven false, as they always are. Yes, networks have gotten better than they were twenty, or even ten, years ago, but they’re still fallible, and that still doesn’t prevent any of the other seven from creating problems.”
https://blogs.newardassociates.com/blog/2026/titit-local-ai.html
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“What’s happening was pretty obvious, however. Generating working (for a given definition of …#
“What’s happening was pretty obvious, however. Generating working (for a given definition of “working”) code or plausible text has never been easier, while validating that the output was correct is getting proportionally harder.”
https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/ai-mandates-are-a-demand-for-cognitive-surrender
Mastodon Source 🐘#
Peacock’s availability metrics: - Ads: 100% - The NBA game: 95%#
Peacock’s availability metrics:
Ads: 100%
The NBA game: 95%
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“But I think the “just use files” crowd is drawing exactly the right conclusion from exactly …#
“But I think the “just use files” crowd is drawing exactly the right conclusion from exactly half the picture. They’re right about representation—and dangerously silent about concurrency. That asymmetry is worth unpacking, because it points to something important about the state management challenges ahead for agentic systems, and to deeper open questions that connect concurrency theory to approximation theory.”
https://jhellerstein.github.io/blog/ai-mixed-consistency/