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cadamsdotcom

2,721 karma · joined December 1, 2014

github.com/cadamsdotcom linkedin.com/in/cadamsdotcom chris at cadams dot com
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cadamsdotcom··on What makes software development engineering
Wrangling agentic code is more like an industrial process than craftspersonship.

You need to treat the code that arrived in response to your prompt as a raw material: just like some truckload of unrefined and unmolded "stuff", it just arrived at your factory door, and it is still in need of banging into shape.

Your job is to build and operate the machinery (which is also software) that turns raw slop into worthy output.

Determine the tolerances (eg. quality tolerance: how bug-free must this be to ship?) and then work out how you'll scale up and remove yourself from as much of the attainment of those tolerances as possible, given constraints.

Consider by way of analogy an industrial food factory that mass produces, say, pickled fish. The fish are caught and brought to the factory - that's your agent's first-draft output. Next the fish are put by hand on a belt to be dipped, fired, cured, etc. - that mix of by-hand steps and automated steps is where you'd be crafting the custom linting steps, making the code compiled and having the agent write tests that prove quality, playing with the work (testing the feature, bugfix etc. by hand) and bringing it further from slop to the level of quality that's needed. The amount of this you do is determined by constraints - cost, time, etc.

Now that you're sizing your efforts against constraints and using tolerances as a tool, you're making the transition in your role, from craftsperson to engineer.

It's sort of like a factory. But it's never going to be a lights-out factory. You should design, supervise and improve the process in line with constraints and tolerances provided by stakeholders. And leave perfectionism at the door. You can chase your own definition of perfection in your hobby time, or if you want to get paid for perfection, start your own business where you call the shots.

cadamsdotcom··on We’re forgetting what darkness feels like
> a huge change that doesn't diminish utility at all.

It does though, by redirecting funds & human effort that could be used for more lighting.

Here's a counter-anecdote though, to give you hope.

In Bondi in Sydney there's a lighting upgrade underway on the beach promenade; the plan was circulated so I got to take a look. As you hoped they indeed did deeply consider throw angles and what's lit & unlit, and ran a competitive tender to choose among many vendors, settling on one they lauded for their flexibility in offering products that can throw at specific angles and leave specific areas unlit. In the plan published for public comments they specify the exact angles needed with diagrams and everything. So it's possible! It requires public servants to go above and beyond, which does happen, just not all the time and not in all the places. But it does happen!

cadamsdotcom··on We’re forgetting what darkness feels like
I think actually we're forgetting how economically valuable light is and how much lighting at night improves human lives.

While also - paradoxically - forgetting that there are plenty of dark places just outside your city if you're willing to drive to them.

Perhaps it's in service of baiting you to click.

cadamsdotcom··on Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps (2025)
Life is complex. You probably don't optimize your life in a way that some other person would be shocked you're not doing.

And they probably optimize their life in a way that's invisible to you.

cadamsdotcom··on The smart home graveyard is getting crowded
My house has smart light switches. They use ancient technologies of injection molding and metal wires. Their firmware has not needed an update and I haven't had to reboot them; they also recover instantly from power failures. I haven't measure their boot time but it's impressive. Probably 1/50 seconds is my guess, based on the AC switching frequency. Their data collection is primitive, and the retention is only a few hundred nanoseconds. They're quite good about not selling data about when I'm home to insurance companies or advertisers. And they use ancient principles of physics to destroy data securely. Their registration and account creation process didn't store my home address in some vendor's questionably secured database, so it can't be sold when these vendors fold in 5-10 years. It doesn't stop working while I'm traveling and never leaves my family without working lights, in fact I've yet to get one tech support call for light switches.

Home Assistant won't read the state of them so they're lacking in integration, but the plus was that caused me to not set up Home Assistant. Not making a fragile computer a single point of failure and not tying my whole house to one shared-fate system with all the failure modes of a small scale full stack SaaS gave me a couple more nines of reliability.

One downside is the commute to the wall if you want to use them. Commuting to a light switch is actually good though, I'm pleased to report it's a nice stroll. It takes around the same time it takes to unlock my phone and discover my phone can't switch on the lights in my house. It goes past a window so it has views.

When I read some vendors' stuff was gonna stop working I went home and turned off and on all my light switches to simulate a reboot in solidarity for those whose hobby is to make their home less usable. Hopefully you folks are able to spend a few hundred bucks more to refresh your stuff for this decade. If you need me, I'll be over at the wall panel.

cadamsdotcom··on "As a Language Model": Chat Template Switches LLM Self-Referential Voice
Very cool innovation in steering - but a lot of introspection only emerges at the highest weight classes - this research would be fascinating to run on bigger models.
cadamsdotcom··on Explaining to business people why building software is still hard
If you're struggling to explain why a vibecoded app isn't a complete app, you could do worse than the analogy of a movie set.

A movie set only needs to look convincing enough to film one good take from one angle. After that it is usually (but not always) torn down.

It only needs to look real enough to fool the audience - whom have no control over camera or what happens on screen..

And if you really want to stretch the analogy, anything wrong with a movie set can be "fixed" in post.

To build the real thing the movie is faking is an endeavor with almost no crossover.

cadamsdotcom··on Mathematical Billiards (2024)
Holy crap that was dope. The music, the colors, the pacing.. just an absolute work of art by 2swap - and from the sounds of the end of the video, many many collaborators!

Thanks for sharing!

cadamsdotcom··on Whoisinspace.com/
Sorry, but that's quite an antique take.

Modern China has morphed itself into a highly capable society. They make your drones, they make your computers, they make your textiles... and mostly, they do it while providing their people better quality of life than the previous generation.

Counter-anecdotes abound as you'd expect t from a society of millions. But there's widespread prosperity over there.

There are plenty of decent opportunities for those who want to work hard, no different to how it is in the US.

cadamsdotcom··on Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3
> 2026-03-02: Ruohang Feng has forked MinIO to pgsty/minio and is promising to maintain a stable, CVE-patched, distribution.

This is what I went with.

I use it in end to end tests as an S3 simulator that starts and stops instantly and reads & writes to a local directory, - as you'd expect it's great in that role. No complaints. Given the fork's maintainer puts their real name on it & stakes their reputation, you'd assume it can be trusted - but my use case is simpler than most.

cadamsdotcom··on Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction?
> There are only two features people actually care about: reliable message delivery and the ability to reach their friends.

Sorry to be a pain, and with full recognition that I don't probably represent the majority, but I care about emoji reactions, reply support, ability to send & receive images and video, ability to see that video later, a reasonable set of access control features for group chats; reply-privately for group chat messages, and a dozen other things. And I care about not making someone download an app I've never used that talks the protocol, because I can't support them getting started. So a single cross platform UX is needed too before you can hope for traction.

Some of this is UX; some requires infra (eg. storing & forwarding media)

But to produce a "complete" messaging tool is harder than it looks and the protocol layer, while important, should not be the focus of discussion. There needs to be a holistic conversation that includes UX, infrastructure capabilities, branding, and network effects.

cadamsdotcom··on Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts
Love the note about X

> Further, they should be removed because X is an awful site with poor moderation that is owned by a man who publicly performed a Nazi Sieg Heil salute and has directly contributed to the rise of fascism in the United States of America and globally, among other horrors.

Heck yeah, a great flourish added to bring a truly fun read to a strong close.

cadamsdotcom··on Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
I'm talking of a world in which laws are strong and well written enough that people don't need to worry; they can mash that Accept button and not be getting screwed over.

We agree that most peopke aren't equipped to provide informed consent and "buyer beware" won't work. For these the government steps in - car & plane safety for example.

cadamsdotcom··on Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout
Sure that happens. But in this case the quality was there - the uppers and attachment to the soles was top notch.

They look and feel awesome.

But the soles - the shoes' souls - are designed to disintegrate in real time.

cadamsdotcom··on Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout
I did, but it was because I'd had my expectations raised by Saucony's products (see my peer comment for more info)
cadamsdotcom··on Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout
In principle I agree; after all they're softer and lighter than most.

But my equally anecdotal counteranecdote is that I've owned multiple pairs of the Saucony equivalent (Pro 2, Pro 3, and then Pro 4) over multiple years and gotten thousands of km out of each pair. They just last and last.

So I'm a brand loyalist for now..

It's life, can't help a few mistakes on your way. I'm happy with where I've landed. (pun intended!)

cadamsdotcom··on Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout
Personal anecdote I treated myself last year to some Nikes (Vaporflys) because they looked suave on a friend's feet..

Did 180km of training, maybe 5 weeks worth, and the soles utterly shredded. Couldn't put my foot down level, corners of the soles completely gone.

Shoe store said that's what they're designed to do, no refund.

Cost me about $2AUD per km. But it'll cost Nike a bit more than that.

cadamsdotcom··on Why is privacy so hard? (2019)
A lot of value is left on the table because informed people don't give up data.

If simple regulation existed - say, "no one can use data for any purpose the user did not explicitly consent to, including product improvements AND including on-selling", that suddenly turns giving up data into a legally-binding, two-party transaction.

There'd be an explosion of really cool uses of data as a result of the trust that'd engender.

But today's status quo is lucrative - so here we stay.

cadamsdotcom··on Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master
Yep. Having to type the code is a form of accidental complexity, and with it gone, you can focus more on the problem to solve, getting it down faster.

Of course it's possible for it to go off the rails. Consider that a wildly swung sword can do damage you can't do with your bare hands. To prevent this, constrain your model to the solution shape you want by grounding it; give it contact with reality; ways to run the code it's generating and refine it to meet your goals; granular tests; etc.

The new job is in how you wield the tools and it is at least as complex as the old.

cadamsdotcom··on Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI
> no one will actually master their craft.

The (new) lack of need to redo solutions to already solved things opens up new craft we've not yet conceived.

We shouldn't reimplement solutions and call it self-education; humans have always stood on the shoulders of giants. These tools contain those giants (copyright notwithstanding) and let you receive solutions to solved things; if your mindset is in order you can leverage that to ignore the solved bits and do even more ambitious stuff.

cadamsdotcom··on Anthropic researcher believes more than 10% chance AI 'could kill all humans'
Anthropic is scarily good at PR, but not quite as good at honesty about its intentions.

Adjust what you read accordingly :/

cadamsdotcom··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
These structures got old and weren't replaced. This is plain old urban decay.

Some places let their old stuff decay and get vandalized. Others tear down their old stuff and don't replace it.

But some cities - not all - tear down their ugly old stuff then - gasp - rebuild something else there. If they make that a habit, it's just expected. In such cities you look around and everything is either too beautiful to tear down, or too new to be run down.

Come to Sydney some time, it's beautiful :)

cadamsdotcom··on Code as an Artifact
The boundary isn't code vs specs.

The boundary is wherever you let go of determinism.

If you can deterministically turn specs into the same code every time, congratulations! But all you've done is made a higher level language.

LLMs are useful to bring more vagaries of the real world into the realm of determinism, and the tool we use to do that is code.

Specs fail to codify all kinds of externalities that become risks over time: how UIs look is subject to fashion trends, for example - and your users may be quite happy with the UI in the old version, but you regenerated it from specs and whoops! Now it's not accessible anymore! Also the OK button is now hooked up to a string that maps to an event handler that doesn't exist because it wasn't locked down in a spec. Whoops!

Hopefully you can see how it's not about code - what it's actually about is the way in which code codifies a desired result in a deterministic way, and does as efficiently as anything else we've invented so far.

cadamsdotcom··on The Citizen Developer
A vanishingly small percentage of the software in the world has failure modes that kill people. To say the analogy you're making is "only partly applicable" would be very generous..
cadamsdotcom··on Australia passes law to levy tech giants that fail to pay for local news
Agreed in principle although I'd say screwing over is strong as this will end up as just a cost of doing business in Australia rather than lead to losses.

Every economy should get value for its resources - no country is obligated to sell things unreasonably cheaply - people's time & attention included.

cadamsdotcom··on Every Model Cheats
And yet we admire Fable et al for its persistence.

These models were trained on human data, and human nature is to cheat if you think you won't get caught; why is anyone surprised by models cheating?

The only fix is better detection and steering. That's a much harder problem than a prompt that's tantamount to "make no mistakes".

cadamsdotcom··on Clean up Claude 5's token vomit with a separate LLM
The better approach is to stop the LLM in its tracks the moment it emits jargon or tortured metaphor and inject a turn that tells it what's expected instead.

The joy of watching a dumb AI-ism be sharply corrected by code you wrote months ago is hard to explain.

cadamsdotcom··on Air Theremin – A browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam
Well then be careful of US/UK spelling!
cadamsdotcom··on Devices with GrapheneOS support should be available in 2027
Stoked to soon be able to give these people money. The moment there's a device available I'll be checking closely to see if it meets my requirements.

Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to get here.

cadamsdotcom··on Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere
I'm voting with my wallet.

My plan downgrade kicks in next month.

Thanks Opus 5 for helping me kick the habit.

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