Developer-Productivity
I Love the Sound Scaling Laws Make as They Whoosh By — Every time someone announces AI scaling is dead, they're writing eulogies for a fuel, not for fire. The Jevons paradox, applied.
Lock-In Was Always a Switching-Cost Problem — The product never trapped you. The migration cost did. AI is collapsing that cost, and the lock-in playbook is going with it.
The Build Was Broken When I Got Here. This Is Fine. — Diffuse responsibility, applied to broken builds. Each agent's local report is technically correct: failures predate this task. Multiply across every agent and nobody owns the broken build — there is no somebody else.
If I Had More Time, I'd Have Written Neater Code — The power of a programming language is not in what it lets you do — it's in what it doesn't. Rust may be better for agents than it is for humans. I find this funny.
To The Left, To The Left — Every step to the right on the development timeline multiplies the cost of a fix. Shift-left is the philosophy that keeps moving 'find out this is broken' earlier in the loop.
Reviews are in: my Agents have ADD — My agents review everything with the same sustained, undifferentiated focus. Every PR gets the same checklist. They notice everything and see nothing.
The Push Bike Harness — Most agent harnesses are training wheels. They prevent the falls — and the learning. DEAR (Define, Enforce, Audit, Resolve) is an attempt at a push-bike design instead.
Pull the Cord — Teams get agentic tooling and point it at the existing task list. Nobody asks the agent to verify whether the documentation still reflects reality. The maintenance function needs to be explicit.
Death by a Thousand Tests — Not every check belongs in the synchronous path. The right amount of enforcement isn't the maximum — it's where the cost of checking balances the cost of missing.
Oops I Did It Again, I Forgot --dry-run — Even capable engineers point at production when they mean dev. Permissions and guardrails give them — and AI agents — a survivable margin for error. Build so mistakes don't take down the building.
Most Rules Exist for a Reason — An AI agent encountering a constraint it doesn't understand will do what any capable new hire would: question it. Unlike a new hire, it might remove the fence without asking.
Schrödinger's Syntax — Engineers spent seventy years building better programming languages so intent could be specified precisely. AI takes English as input. That's not a flaw — it's the specification problem, unmasked.
Don't Hate the Agent, Hate the Process — Agents cut corners because the process lets them. When an agent does something you didn't intend, it didn't fail — it taught you where your process breaks.
Stop Asking Einstein to Run Your Datacenters — We build the most capable AI systems ever created, then use them to parse JSON and fix typos. Save the reasoning engine for work that actually requires reasoning.