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
The developer’s dilemma
When it comes to making money, software developers are an odd bunch. Developers produce code, and code is in high demand. At a glance, it…
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.
Former Apple Developer Explains Why The Company's Software Is Struggling - BGR
In recent months, Apple's software development has been called into question like never before. Between a critical security bug in macOS, a brand-new product being…
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
Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software
Is Apple losing its crown as the champion of simplicity? Maybe. But for a very good reason.
AI boosts worker productivity — but does that translate to final outputs? | MIT Sloan
A new study found that developers using AI tools can write much more code than those working without AI, but they don’t release as much new software.
The open source community that embraces designers most, wins.
That’s my theory. Here’s my reasoning:
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...
The value of human, exploratory testing
Ann and Michael find things programmers never would have.Since unit testing and test-driven development burst onto the programming scene in the early 2000s, too many programmers have deluded themse…
Peopleware: productive projects and teams
Demarco and Lister demonstrate that the major issues of…
