David Crawshaw
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16 October
15 October
14 October
11 October
10 October
9 October
7 October
5 October
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1 October
30 September
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28 September
7 May
From one piece The agent principal-agent problem 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
there is no principal-agent problem, because the human driving the machine takes on the responsibility for its actions by owning the deployment.
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Their words
There is no incentive for the human driving the agent to actually read the code or spend time thinking about what the reviewer says.
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Their words
the reviewer is the principal, the contributor is the agent, and code review only worked because the reviewer could cheaply infer effort from reading the code. Agents collapse that signal.
22 April
From one piece I am building a cloud 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
VMs are the wrong cloud abstraction because they bundle CPU and memory into fixed-size units.Their words
VMs are the wrong shape because they are tied to CPU/memory resources.
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Their words
Agents, by making it easiest to write code, means there will be a lot more software.
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Their words
You cannot solve the fundamental problems with cloud abstractions by building new abstractions on top.
22 March
8 February
From one piece Eight more months of agents 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The best software design for an AI agent to use is the same as the best design for a human programmer.Their words
the best software for an agent is whatever is best for a programmer.
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korrents.com
Most current software and ways of solving problems are structured the wrong way for the agent era.Their words
Most software is the wrong shape now. Most of the ways we try to solve problems are the wrong shape.
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korrents.com
Local AI models will eventually catch up to frontier models once frontier progress hits diminishing returns.Their words
At some point frontier models will face diminishing returns, local models will catch up, and we will be done being beholden to frontier models.
4 August 2025
8 June 2025
From one piece How I program with Agents 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Most software has too few users or too short a lifespan for long-term maintenance costs to matter.Their words
Very few programs ever reach the point that they are heavily used and long-lived. Almost everything has few users, or is short-lived, or both.
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korrents.com
Graphics chips have far more room for future performance gains than CPUs, which are nearing physical limits.Their words
GPUs are not nearly as restricted in their future progress as CPUs which are far more constrained in how they can physically improve (compiler-driven ILP only goes so far).
6 January 2025
From one piece How I program with LLMs 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So I foresee a world with far more specialized code, with fewer generalized packages, and more readable tests.
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Their words
One thing humans appear to be much better than LLMs at (as of January 2025) is not getting distracted.
31 October 2024
3 May 2024
21 April 2024
6 February 2024
From one piece jsonfile: a quick hack for tinkering 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Programming is fundamentally the practice of making tradeoffs about what matters and what doesn't.Their words
Programming is the art of tradeoffs. You have to decide what matters and what does not.
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korrents.com
Most projects fail before they even begin because the activation energy required to start is too high.Their words
Most projects fail before they start. They fail because the activation energy is too high.
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korrents.com
The right moment to migrate from an ad hoc data store to SQL is the moment you first need an index.Their words
I suspect, considering the process retrospect, a great deal of that pain can be avoided by committing to migrating directly to an SQL system the moment you need an index.
31 December 2022
11 December 2021
From one piece log4j: between a rock and a hard place 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Software upgrades that invalidate previously learned knowledge make programmers worse at their craft.Their words
When software "upgrades" invalidate my old knowledge, it makes me a worse programmer.
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Their words
We as a profession misunderstand and misuse the concept of backwards compatibility, both upstream and downstream, by focusing on narrow legalistic definitions instead of outcomes.
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Their words
a good software project tries to break downstream as little as possible, and when we do break downstream, we should do our best to make the breakage obvious and easy to fix.
25 November 2021
16 July 2021
7 June 2021
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Mac OSTheir words
I have a lot of feelings about macOS: it is astonishingly painful for developers, but makes up for it with a consistent experience for users.
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Usesrcmnd.app
Elgato Wave 3Their words
Microphones are important, so I have an Elgato Wave:3 and open ear headphones.
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Usesrcmnd.app
ProxmoxTheir words
The Headless AMD Threadripper is running Proxmox. My main Debian environment runs as a VM here, along with various Windows test VMs,
+ 6 more
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
DebianTheir words
Debian is a decent programming environment. It has some of the consistency properties like macOS, but fails unexpectedly.
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Usestheir ownrcmnd.app
TailscaleTheir words
All the sockets between my computers are over Tailscale, so whenever I grab the laptop and leave the house, the connections to my VMs and NAS remain stable.
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Usesrcmnd.app
VimTheir words
For writing software I full-screen a terminal and use Vim. Ctrl+Z for a shell.
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
VS CodeTheir words
Every now and again I go searching for a replacement IDE. VSCode came closer than anything else in the last two decades to replacing Vim, but somehow I am back here.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
QSFP+ 40gbit hardwareTheir words
The router and Proxmox machines are attached with some QSFP+ 40gbit hardware I got off eBay. It's fun! I highly recommend playing with second-hand network hardware.
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Usesrcmnd.app
iMac 5kTheir words
The 2014 iMac 5k I dedicate to video conferencing, mostly Hangouts and Zoom.
29 November 2020
29 June 2020
28 January 2020
29 September 2019
10 September 2019
28 April 2019
14 April 2019
31 October 2018
30 July 2018
16 July 2018
18 May 2018
13 April 2018
5 April 2018
Nothing matches.
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