There’s this gap that I’ve been struggling with for a long time, and I often feel like I am no closer to finding a way to bridge it. It’s a gap between nuance and action. I’ve talked about many var…
How to Think for Yourself
Delphi | Scale Your Insight. Stay Focused on What Matters.
Delphi turns your expertise into an always-on presence, so you can grow your reach, serve your audience, and lead with clarity, without burning out.
Notion encourages busy-work and I’m tired of it
Why has everything become so needlessly complicated?
How To Think Real Good | Meta-rationality
Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.
Value Pairs: A New Way of Approaching Product Development
How AI-enabled teams can change how we think about product development
X : Do you think AI / vibe coding is not worthwhile? Me : Are you kidding? I was talking about conversational programming (what you call vibe coding) back in 2018. Of course, I think it's important.… | Simon Wardley | 44 comments
X : Do you think AI / vibe coding is not worthwhile? Me : Are you kidding? I was talking about conversational programming (what you call vibe coding) back in 2018. Of course, I think it's important. I think the approach we're using currently is flawed. X : Why? Me : Well, I could go on about the basics such as the medium is wrong (needs to be more image / whiteboard based rather than text) or how we're getting wrapped up in deterministic outputs (text based code) rather than realising the end outputs will eventually be non-deterministic models or we're still learning practices in this space especially with agents and how we rushing ahead into failure creating trust issues. There's a lot of messy stuff happening. But my real interest is with turning software engineering into an engineering discipline. X : Isn't it? Me : If I look at a map of decision making then testing (specifically TDD) is an engineering topic (see figure 1) but the development part is firmly a craft (see figure 2). If we want to make development an engineering subject then we need to learn from testing i.e. we should be building context specific tools (think a test suite) from lots of micro tools (think tests). See figure 3. X : And AI can help? Me : Oh, yes. In two parts - the construction of micro tools which helps us improve our ttA (time to answer) and in the construction of new hypothesis which helps us improve our ttQ (time to question). See figure 4. X : And is that happening? Me : Very slowly. Remember you have a multi billion dollar tool industry that doesn't want you creating tools and hence they're trying to flog you old tools with a skim of AI. X : But we need people selling pickaxes. Me : Sure. But they've been telling us that their pickaxes work everywhere ... making soup, you need a pickaxe with added AI. X : But coding is coding. Me : An electronic healthcare system is not the same as an online gambling site. The contexts are completely different. It's why the test suites are different and a test is nothing more than a micro tool. Why don't we compose our tool for that context out of micro tools ... just like testing? X : Because it's hard? Me: Pickaxe salespeople must love you. That's their marketing literature. Reminds me of the early days of Test Driven Development (TDD) where most people thought it was mad to build a test suite out of thousands of small tests. | 44 comments on LinkedIn
On Taste, Effort & Curiosity - again
When AI collapses how long it takes to ship, what’s left is judgment, experimentation, and knowing what not to build.
Art or tool?
The Internet spaces I tend to inhabit have more polarisation than at many other recent times, and little explication of the worldviews that lead to different premises for discussion, that in turn...
Abeba Birhane on Twitter / X
a classic case of “the human mind is afforded less complexity than is owed, and the computer is afforded more wisdom than is due.” Baria and Cross (2021)that "vibe" is at the core of what makes us human. it defies formalization and datafication https://t.co/AXELAqlYcq— Abeba Birhane (@Abebab) February 17, 2024
6 steps to perfecting an open source product strategy
The future of building great products lies in breaking down the boundaries between business and technical thinking.
THE BRAND GAP — MARTY NEUMEIER
How to bridge the distance between business strategy and design
