> Delegating your decision-making, ranking, assessment, strategising, analysis, or any other form of reasoning to a chatbot becomes the functional equivalent to phoning a psychic for advice.

Lots of comments talking about how recent accomplishments disprove the article but I think this bit holds up pretty well.

LLMs are very good at tricking people into thinking they have capabilities that they don’t.

Just delete stuff you’re not going to do.

How do I stop someone else from putting that back on my backlog again?

Just today I had someone open a bug on my code because they decided that the organization was wrong. Some modules should be moved from one directory to another. Never mind why they opened it as a bug, the reality is people are opening and putting stories on my backlog.

I wouldn’t delete any items any backlog items. Much better to always close with a reason. You can make this a first class status in whatever platform like a “Closed - Duplicate”, “Closed - Unneeded”, etc.

This helps with searching for rationale in the future, looking back to similar items, etc.

You can’t stop someone from putting it back but you can close it as duplicate and link it as related.

Edit: also if the person putting work in the backlog is not a core contributor or product you should formalize some other intake process that can triage whether it meets the bar to get in

If they can't justify why this is a bug, and why it's worth your time to fix this as opposed to something else, you should be able to revoke their permission to touch your backlog.

This is great when you’re the sole dev and PM. It does not scale well. Especially if you have stakeholders above you in the org chart.

Yes, but easier said than done.

> The vast vast majority of shops are not going to adopt Extreme Programming

True!

> and cut their velocity in half

That’s not how pair programming works.

I've done pair programming (at an Extreme Programming shop).

There are lots of benefits to the practice in terms of knowledge transfer, catching bugs (and otherwise benefiting from having "two sets of eyes") and so on.

But ... it definitely lowers how much code you produce. Maybe two people work a little faster than one (maybe it only cuts velocity to 55% or 60%) ... but it definitely cuts output by a lot.

Pair programming is not about getting more done, it's about getting less done (but done better).

“It doesn’t scale” and “it’s unreasonably difficult for many people” aren’t the same thing.

It scales fine to 400+ engineers. You do have to be willing to hire specifically for pairing tolerance.

“Only an extreme blood-and-soil nationalist would prefer indigenous anarchy or tyranny to imperial democracy, prosperity, and rule of law.”

This sentence is extremely funny in the context of actual ethnographic research on “indigenous anarchy.”

And whatever they imagine "imperial democracy" is. They should ask some indigenous people.

As if there was such a thing as a universal definition of indigenous people and everyone who met that definition had the same behaviour.

How about "They were there before the first colonizers got there"?

The ones who arrived in 1800CE? Or the ones who arrived in 1000CE? Or the ones who arrived in 1500BCE? Or the ones who arrived in 15000BCE? Where do you draw the line?

I would think that there was a group of people who got there first and survived. All groups that followed them can be viewed as colonizers or conquerors I would think.

What if they left for a while then wanted to come back?

What if you just stated your actual point instead of asking stupid questions?

Look, I get that folks in the US and other colonial projects feel a-okay in genociding the folks who were living there previously. I also get that you can't understand the different connection to specific pieces of land that folks such as the Ute, Navajo, and Hopi folks I live around have compared to my own connections to place and people.

But you'd be way less annoying if you'd just state your (almost-certainly-inhuman-if-plainly-stated) argument instead of trying to "hah gottem"ing yourself.

My point, such as it is, is that trying to divide people into groups that are "good" or "evil", based on the actions of their ancestors is morally dubious at best.

It doesn't (should not) matter whether you are descended from "colonizers" or "colonized", even setting aside how hard those terms are to define in any reasonably way. What matters is your current situation, what you've personally done, and what society/government can do to help everyone.

People, especially on the left, really like to play oppression olympics where whoever can justify qualifying as the most oppressed is the winner and thus the arbiter of morality and gets to decide who is right and who is wrong.

You bring up the Navajo and Hopi and Ute, and I'm certainly willing to make a bet that the average person "born in that tribe" (using that term extremely loosely) is going to be, uh, "economically disadvantaged", to put it mildly.

And I would argue with all of my heart that those people deserve help (and, by context, need considerably more help than the equivalent person born in, dunno, the hamptons) but the reason the deserve help is because of things like being born to poor parents in poor towns who don't have access to affordable schools/training/food/whatever.

It doesn't matter, morally speaking, whether or not these people are descendents from american indians or india indians or irish or german or russian or whatever. What matters is what is happening right now.

I'm certainly open to the argument of "Yes that's all true but it's a lot easier to just select everyone currently from the Hopi tribe instead of trying to be more specific", in a similar way to race based affirmative action type policies for colleges, but lets keep in mind that nobody inherits the sins, or virtues, of their parents. We're all born fresh and it's important to keep that in mind.

Say more?

After a bunch of experiences like this I will now basically only use test runners that automatically run the tests in randomized order.

Gotta catch that stuff early.

I do make the assumption that the reader is trying to look competent to their boss/clients yes. If that's not the reader's goal then I have very little to offer.

Author here. Do you generally find that people who are not software developers understand what you mean when you say "technical debt?"

That depends.

People who are around developers, often yes.

Whenever someone doesn't get it, it's easy enough to explain in one sentence: Technical debt is the result of decisions that we've made, willingly or unwillingly, or knowingly or unknowingly, that make changes slower and riskier.

In the case of a newly committed file you can add just the file with

git add . -N

And then review the text itself as part of the git add -p workflow

TIL about git add -N / --intent-to-add :

  git add --intent-to-add .
  git diff
  git add -p .

  ## To then reset and keep changes
  ## these are equivalent:
  # git reset .
  # git reset --mixed .

The issue here isn’t that this guy shared something about his personal life it’s the particular personal details. It’s possible to share information about your personal life without talking about your drug use or your therapy or your drug use at therapy.

It is irritating that people expect you to understand what reasonable personal sharing is without explaining explicitly and goodness knows I screwed this up when I was younger but “don’t talk about your personal life at all” is bad advice.