Nice. I can't recall what I was originally intended to write in response when you first emailed this and Spotify was having an issue.
Today, I am thinking of a meeting earlier today regarding the merging of autogenerated (Mend Renovate) pull requests. I mentioned that I had been doing test-driven development for a while, as in the dinosaurs have been gone for a while, and that I believed if tests are written correctly, and the PR passes all the tests, it should be merged, and unless it causes an immediate problem, casual code review can happen later.
The way I use AI coding tools, is to first write tests, then build my prompts from there. This has worked well for me, so far, mostly using Claude Code.
Of course, that does not stop me from vibe coding like crazy in my spare time. I just wrote an agent to attempt to make me a reservation at a hard-to-get-into restaurant in Paris at the moment that reservations for that date open up. Of course, nobody will die or lose their job if it doesn't work, and 15 minutes seems like an appropriate investment of time.
You piece was beautifully written. If you decide to turn to fiction, I think that Thomas Pynchon's gig might be up for grabs.
Really appreciate this, especially the TDD angle, which is exactly right, though my piece necessarily circles around it lest it turn into a novella.
Tests are sufficient for merging to the extent they actually capture the system’s invariants. Where they don’t, that validation used to happen in the act of reading the code. You’ve been doing the thing while everyone else has been naming it.
Using tests to drive prompts is a clean way of pushing that structure upstream.
The Paris agent is the perfect use case. Low stakes, fully reversible, no accumulation. Fifteen minutes of coding to get a reservation at Septime sounds like an instantly monetizable agentic service.
The Pynchon reference shows you really get it, and also makes me think of that classic coding style pastiche, “If Hemingway Wrote Javascript” https://anguscroll.com/hemingway/
Whether Pynchon or Hemingway would have written better prompts is left as an exercise to the reader.
Nice. I can't recall what I was originally intended to write in response when you first emailed this and Spotify was having an issue.
Today, I am thinking of a meeting earlier today regarding the merging of autogenerated (Mend Renovate) pull requests. I mentioned that I had been doing test-driven development for a while, as in the dinosaurs have been gone for a while, and that I believed if tests are written correctly, and the PR passes all the tests, it should be merged, and unless it causes an immediate problem, casual code review can happen later.
The way I use AI coding tools, is to first write tests, then build my prompts from there. This has worked well for me, so far, mostly using Claude Code.
Of course, that does not stop me from vibe coding like crazy in my spare time. I just wrote an agent to attempt to make me a reservation at a hard-to-get-into restaurant in Paris at the moment that reservations for that date open up. Of course, nobody will die or lose their job if it doesn't work, and 15 minutes seems like an appropriate investment of time.
You piece was beautifully written. If you decide to turn to fiction, I think that Thomas Pynchon's gig might be up for grabs.
Really appreciate this, especially the TDD angle, which is exactly right, though my piece necessarily circles around it lest it turn into a novella.
Tests are sufficient for merging to the extent they actually capture the system’s invariants. Where they don’t, that validation used to happen in the act of reading the code. You’ve been doing the thing while everyone else has been naming it.
Using tests to drive prompts is a clean way of pushing that structure upstream.
The Paris agent is the perfect use case. Low stakes, fully reversible, no accumulation. Fifteen minutes of coding to get a reservation at Septime sounds like an instantly monetizable agentic service.
The Pynchon reference shows you really get it, and also makes me think of that classic coding style pastiche, “If Hemingway Wrote Javascript” https://anguscroll.com/hemingway/
Whether Pynchon or Hemingway would have written better prompts is left as an exercise to the reader.