You have to be intentional with your remaining minutes — dealing with other people’s bullshit is not a valuable use of those minutes.
]]>At work: I value, care, and have strong feelings about, how we approach work. What are the systems, the culture, the way we work? Are we being honest with what we’re trying to get done? Do they let us focus on the problems to be solved? Specifically: the problems the customer wants solved? These can be technical, but don't end up in the nitty gritty of ‘which specific design pattern should we use’, or ‘which library should we use’, or even ‘how should these components specifically fit together’. The most impactful, and durable decisions are about the guiding principles that we use to make decisions — what cultural values do we embrace to make decisions (both formally, and informally).
It’s not process, it’s aligning on the shared value. It’s about communicating.
Technical roles often advertise the criticality of technical decisions — but often they are uninteresting, low-impact considerations. The decisions are, in isolation, arbitrary. They’re just one of many ways to skin the proverbial cat. What is more interesting to me is how it fits in to the context of our culture — is this the right way for us?
However, in personal projects: I’m focused on those technical choices — that specific component relationship, the uniqueness of my use case. I enjoy it — because it’s for me. I’m not making it for someone else, whose goals are different from mine. I don’t have to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.
Is this because I’m less technical these days? Or is it because I see those fine details as ephemeral, and actually the why & how we decided is the truly durable artefact?
]]>Slack (and Microsoft Teams) creating tools to auto summarise threads while also offering to generate replies to those same messages is a canonical example.
Yes, you are a busy person; yes, you need the highlights; but at the same time most chats that justify summarisation are filled with nuance. Do you trust the AI to capture all the nuance? It can barely capture nuance today. It’s also a symptom of the fact that people don’t care enough to put the time & energy into understanding what is happening in their job and/life.
The excuse: “Oh, but they’re busy people, and you can’t expect them to do everything perfectly. Sometimes they need the tl;dr”. Sure, but it’s careless — it permeates everything “Oh, i’m so busy, let the AI summarise it”.
But! Conversations are two sided! Generating emails, generating content, to convey information in a textual form is predicated on an expectation that the other side will read it. It’s the generation of significant amounts of text that the other side is assumed to read. But it won’t be. It’ll be summarised into empty calories.
AI writeth. AI readeth.
]]>These ideas infect your tech organisation driving you to make unnatural decisions that are in direct competition with the “right thing” for your customers. Look at 90% of successful tech organisations and really think about why they behave the way they do. You’ll see this lurking right behind the thin veneer of ‘we love our customers’.
We’re not altruistic. We’re mercenary.
]]>How effective they are is dependent on the inputs (materials, model) and the skill of the operator. You have to model the entire shape of your output(s) to be successful. But the operator has to understand how to ensure a successful print with the appropriate level of intervention that matches your needs & expectations.
At the low end, you have Creality producing affordable, powerful — but limited — 3D printing accessible to anyone. At the high end you have LPBF machines from EOS that will print you a metal component for a plane or rocket in highly complex shapes.
LLM coding tools such as Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, and GitHub Copilot CLI are the 3D printers of the software world, and they’ve already transformed what is possible, and the way that the possible is achieved. The hope is they will produce from fixes to features to entire products.
And, just like 3D printing, their adoption & usage is unevenly distributed.
Your coding agent output is dependent on your input materials (specs, details, guidance) how you operate it (follow on prompts, skills, reference materials, validation).
It’s the difference between a useful print, and a pile of plastic goo.
]]>This is both grandiose (look what I did!) and self important (look what I did!). And LLM coding agents are radically changing the connection between you & the materials.
It’s fine that it’s changing.
Code becoming an unimportant detail is fine.
Software Practitioners will be fine.
I will be fine.
But the refrain of “the code was never the point” in response to the lamentation of this foundational shift is dismissive & lacks nuance — it lacks respect.
The journey mattered to those on the fucking journey. It actually wasn’t just about the destination, it was how you got to where you were going.
And it does matter that people feel a sense of… sadness? Loss? that the thing they honed, pined for, and got lost in, is going away. What’s being lost — what’s going away — is not the “typing at the keyboard to put arcane incantations into the ether”, it’s how it feels when you manifest something useful from nothing and share with an audience — a sense of accomplishment.
]]>The LLM is the Temporal Loom.
And we're The TVA.
I continue to be a believer in “goggles” being “the future” — The Chat Box™ can’t be it. Nor can it be screaming into the void, hoping it screams back.
]]>Public companies that make $10bn in profit every quarter, but don’t increase that profit, are perceived as effectively $0-revenue businesses.
]]>When coupled with the transfer of wealth not to the service, but the infrastructure, I wonder if we've got this all the wrong way around. Not only does local compute give power to the user — what happens on your local device, stays on your local device — but it also distributes the power consumption more broadly.
Are SaaS vendors moving calculations to the client today, and only storing the results in cloud storage, off-loading work to the clients? Does this end up trading computation for network egress costs?
Maybe I just don’t understand the aggregate power usage patterns?
]]>My plan is to post them here posterity purposes. But I’ll also be posting social media (e.g., Bluesky and Mastodon) in a threaded format, and link back to the associated blog post.
]]>It’s not the quality of the code, it’s achieving the outcome at all.
This steered us onto the topic of "quality" of output, and they said something closely approximating:
If it works, and it did it faster than a human would have, does it really matter? Ok, it’s not how you might have done it — or how sustainable you feel it may be. But unless you have concrete reasons why it’s not ‘good enough’, does it really matter if it works?
Fam, this got me. My whole career flashed before my eyes. And those of every single developer who has ever been told ‘write better code’, ‘write cleaner code’, or been put through the ringer of an interview where their code was ‘messy’ or ‘inefficient’ and they didn’t get the job.
Now we’re saying it’s OK? Now?
This is with the ‘background radiation’ that ‘architects should be writing more code’. Bro, what. I have to write more code so I stay sharp? But the thinking sand is YOLO? Why do we even bother with in-depth PRs? Why do we follow style guides? Why do we slow it all down, to make sure we get it right when it’s a human, but maybe it doesn’t really matter when it’s a robot?
This person wasn’t being douchey, or aggressive. It was a totally reasonable conversation. But in that moment — that singular moment — I saw the matrix.
]]>Look, we’ll start small. If we get feedback & DSAT (dissatisfaction) increases, we’ll pull back on them. They’re just to help offset the cost of maintaining the services that make our product so compelling. We’ll keep ads off bundle subscribers.
Oh, they didn’t make much money — but that’s because they’re still learning & iterating on the targeting & right partners. That’s also why feedback says they’re annoying because they don’t feel targeted. It’ll get better.
Yeah, we are getting a lot of DSAT, but the ad revenue is really going well. It’s helping fund the next big feature, and the CFO loves us and is giving us more headcount to improve the core product.
We know that these have tarnished some customer opinion of the product and has marginally impacted sales in the EU. But that’s been offset by the exponential growth in revenue — which is almost entirely profit, given our 85% margin!
OK, so, we need to target these ads better to try to save the core business — so we can invest in it. For some reason, our sales have started to drop. We also want to focus on increasing the brand quality of the advertisers so we maintain a premium feel. But we also accept that we can’t grow on our core product, so we’re also investing in a cross-platform app, a better web app, and are working with car manufacturers to integrate our apps directly into the vehicles. They’re going to get a cut of the ad revenue. Plus, we'll get more data access to improve our ad targeting — which we’ll also use to use time & traffic dependent ads.
Oh, we make apps & technology products? I thought we were an ads business.
There was a rumour in Mark Gurman’s Power On Apple newsletter recently:
Apple considers monetizing maps in another move to boost services revenue
… Now, Apple is giving this notion more thought. In a recent all-hands meeting for the Maps group, Apple said monetizing the app is a lever it is exploring. While there is no timeline or active engineering work being done, the company has again floated the idea of charging for prioritization in search results. It also could make certain locations appear more prominently on the map …
Under a week later, Apple announced ‘News+ Food’ to bolster its News+ subscription service. Their most recent quarterly results showed record subscription revenue driven by 14% YoY growth with 76% margins. Like so many in tech, Apple is becoming addicted to Revenue-as-a-service.
RaaS feels so good — the validation from the market with a pat on the head every time the numbers go up. But there’s no way off this merry go round. Reduce your ads, or lower your subscriptions? The validation stops, and chaos begins. Focus on your core product? Branch out into a new non-RaaS area? You’ll never match the margins or scale of your RaaS products. You are trapped in your addiction.
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