Baldur Bjarnason argues that development tools win by making developers replaceable. The JVM ran that experiment three times, against Visual Basic's precedent, through EJB's committee, and into Spring's reversal, and the results say his theory is exactly half of a whole.
React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Tests Are The New Moat | Daniel Saewitz
As AI becomes better at cloning people's open source work, what ends up becoming most valuable are software contracts, tests, and API surface area. This clashes the incentives of clearly defining your commercialized open source software with protecting it.
The two worlds of programming: why developers who make the same observations about LLMs come to opposite conclusions
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Software Engineering Productivity Research - Home
Changing Devtools Is Cheap. Owning Them Isn’t.
AI makes devtools cheap to customize, but personalized forks still demand ongoing attention and ownership.
The virtuous circle
The virtuous circle is the most powerful pattern in developer tooling. And it's the myth of the 10x developer that makes it hard to see.
Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source...
Despite widespread adoption, the impact of AI tools on software development in the wild remains understudied. We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how AI tools at the...
Peopleware: productive projects and teams
Demarco and Lister demonstrate that the major issues of…
Tech companies are cutting jobs and betting on AI. The payoff is far from guaranteed
AI experts say we’re living in an experiment that may fundamentally change the model of work
Aaron Boodman on Twitter / X
There is this tension in dev tooling right now: Lots of people want to self-host, and not depend on a service. Lots of people also want the vibes of open source - being part of an open development community, having the code, etc.But builders still need to make a living...— Aaron Boodman (@aboodman) January 23, 2024
Companies Are Being Torn Apart by AI "Workslop," Stanford Research Finds
Not only is AI hampering productivity, but it's also blowing up collaboration and souring employee dynamics.
Not just development, distribution of software may change as well - <antirez>
Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.
We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design
Our second developer productivity study faces selection effects from wider AI adoption, prompting us to redesign our approach.
