Robert Roskam

I'm not anti-LLM. I'm just pro-thinking.

Everyone I know who is REALLY into AI uses it for reading EVERYTHING longer than 1000 words.

It's the mental equivalent of eating only smoothies, because they go down easier.

I say this with love: reading is thinking.

Stop letting slop think for you.

Any software engineering leader ignoring Shirky Principle risks wrecking their org.

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."

This principle explains why organizations often resist changes that would eliminate the very problems they were created to solve.

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More people should embrace "probably" instead of certainitly.

I recently had someone express nearby me that ADHD is certainly not real, and my immediate reaction was to say, they were certainly wrong. I didn't actually express this because they weren't talking to me.

And upon reflection that reaction itself is wrong. Understandable, but wrong.

They are almost certainly wrong based on current evidence. That is a better framing.

Also for the record, this is what introspection looks like. 😉

Have you ever had AI help you remove code?

Genuine question. Not rhetroical to make a point.

I ask it because whenever I use it claude code or anything else the codebase just seems to naturally inflate, and it'll never really suggest to you, "hey, uh, we got like 10k lines in this function...maybe that's unwieldly."

And before someone is like,"well, it won't ever suggest a thing." I've totally had it suggest ideas. It's just ideas for more other stuff, or it'll just make up new things.

Mechanical sympathy is this niche idea that doesn't get as much play as I think it should in software engineering.

Have you heard the phrase before? If so, how have you heard it invoked?

Internet programming attacks through the ages

80s: hehe...I pretended to be Bob on IRC
90s: 1k people went to my website at once and the server caught on fire
00s: PHP/ActiveX/Flash - we make tech that's basically designed to be hacked
10s: one of these 10k nodejs dependencies got hijacked, glhf figuring out which one
20s: the LLM got prompted-injected via emojis

Renting other people's computers is expensive.

Until you go look at buying them and then running them in a data center and paying for the Internet you need there for >100 servers.

And don't forget paying people to manage those servers.

Recently read a book that said the central concern of software engineering is complexity.

I initially was agreeing until the author defined complexity which was this: anything related to the structure of a system that makes it hard to understand and modify.

I don't have a better definition to put in its place, but that one sounds suspiciously similar to the original definition of tech debt.

Can code be objectively good?

Objectively is doing a lot of work here so let me be very clear. I'm thinking in terms of something like if a hypothesis in science is good.

- testable / falsifiable
- specific, makes a clear prediction
- consistent with existing evidence
- parsimonious, that it's simple
- fruitful, leads somewhere

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'murica. Land of "you will own nothing and be happy" https://youtube.com/shorts/osml_SGSTlk

I think I need more field notes.

#nokings

Are we all just following the dopamine?

Yeah, that's the entire thought.

How much would your next job have to offer you to take it? (Stated in % compared to your present job.)

In all other ways as far as you can tell, it's like your current job. Same field, same benefits, etc.

If someone offered you a sum of money to quit your job today without another one to go to and you're not allowed to just go back to your current job, what's the least you'd take to do that?

What would you do after you quit? Why?

And if there's no amount, why?

Just curious. No judgement.

OH: "In today's AI rich env...."

https://youtube.com/shorts/NzEkKGhPshw

I aspire to greatness like this

I'm suddenly both tempted to move to Mumbai and also to stay as far away as possible https://youtube.com/shorts/yuPJ5s7jVEc

I particularly love this cover of Tool's Schism: https://youtu.be/uDT1tniPD2Q?si=LE5N7VljmnFV8oHz