Tony Meyer
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  • A nice dive into different ways of checking if a vowel is in a string. Make sure to read to the very end for the best answers.

    → 8:25 PM, Dec 3
  • A great set of simple scripts.

    → 8:05 PM, Dec 3
  • For the most part anything that makes a codebase easier for humans to maintain turns out to help agents as well.

    I would add to this: keep files small where possible. The agents won’t load above a certain size, and it’s simpler to have well defined files than for the agent to try to search through and file relevant parts.

    → 6:56 PM, Dec 3
  • Interesting write-up of a hack week project to use agentic coding to build a game using Unreal engine.

    → 6:07 PM, Dec 3
  • I think sometimes people lose the scale of just how big a 10x improvement is. 10x is the difference between your mini-van and a record setting supersonic land jet. Imagine trying to drive your 10 minute commute down your city streets in a car that goes 600mph. Will you get to the other side of town in one tenth the time? No, because even a single 60 second stoplight will eat up your entire time budget. F1 cars slow down to mini-van speeds in basic turns. It turns out that most of any activity is not spent going at top speed.

    “No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive”

    → 5:45 PM, Dec 3
  • This is why I’m still tepid on agentic pull requests. In my experience, agents still need a human in the loop to validate changes & unblock errors. PRs lengthen that loop, which slows you down (you now must check out a branch & build it to validate any changes).

    Also my experience.

    Source.

    → 5:24 PM, Dec 3
  • I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.

    → 4:47 PM, Dec 3
  • Interesting deep dive into 3.11’s specialising adaptive interpreter and how it reduces most of the need to use local aliases for performance.

    → 11:20 PM, Nov 28
  • On code review:

    • How to review code
    • How to make your code reviewer fall in love with you
    • Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reciews
    → 11:06 PM, Nov 28
  • You are not a USB stick

    A great write-up of why remembering the content of a book, fiction or non-fiction, is not the point.

    → 10:47 PM, Nov 28
  • the most important parenting skill isn’t being perfect — it’s repair. When you inevitably lose your patience with your kid or handle something poorly, what matters most is going back and fixing it. Acknowledging what happened, taking responsibility, and reconnecting.

    Sound familiar? Because that’s what good management is about too.(terriblesoftware.org.)

    And not just management, but good relationships in general.

    → 10:41 PM, Nov 28
  • In my experience, these suggestions for how to best use Slack apply to Slack but also any other similar messaging platform.

    → 10:06 PM, Nov 28
  • Unlike some of the earlier posts, Going Public is a bit over the top about how wonderful Slack was.

    One example: just because people didn’t complain about the rebranding for long doesn’t mean it was good. Just that it’s unimportant.

    → 9:52 PM, Nov 28
  • AI and money, like a shorter and less angry Zitron.

    → 9:43 PM, Nov 28
  • You no longer need JavaScript

    → 4:04 PM, Nov 20
  • even if the AI bubble bursts, LLMs can do some amazing things, despite not being overly useful in a business sense while also often being very wrong. Meanwhile, the other parts of AI have already led to a Nobel prize, and are doing astounding things for translation, transcription and image analysis. The AI bubble collapsing has no bearing on that this is some very impressive technology…. AI is not going away, and we’d be fools to disregard it because everyone overhyped it enormously while ruining the economy

    I wish more people were willing to separate the bubble from usefulness and other issues.

    → 1:19 PM, Nov 20
  • Short summary of the work put into developing pylock.toml.

    → 1:05 PM, Nov 20
  • There are no weird files that shouldn’t belong there, no duplicate implementations, and no emojis all over the place. The comments still follow the style I want and, crucially, often aren’t there. I pay close attention to the fundamentals of system architecture, code layout, and database interaction. I’m incredibly opinionated. As a result, there are certain things I don’t let the AI do. I know it won’t reach the point where I could sign off on a commit. That’s why it’s not 100%.

    These models are trained on existing code. Who has been shoving emojis everywhere and writing rubbish and unnecessary comments for the last decade or two? They have much to answer for.

    → 12:47 PM, Nov 20
  • Interesting insight into the early development of Claude Code.

    When Toad is released, it will be interesting to compare. My guess is that something that is potentially built with the help of agents but is way more hand crafted with deep terminal knowledge is going to blow away the Claude Code “vibe code me a markdown renderer” approach.

    → 12:45 PM, Nov 20
  • Nice summary of the state of Python type checking tools in mid 2025.

    → 11:15 AM, Nov 20
  • This is the first rule of strategy: strategy is contextual. A crucial insight, because often when leaders fail, it’s because they tried to apply a strategy that worked in one context, to a different one, without considering the difference. This is true when you change companies, and I think the reason why there is such a high failure rate for executive hires*. Ones I’ve watched fail came in with a playbook, usually including the org chart they wanted, and expended all the goodwill and capital in pursuit of that goal, whilst achieving very little.

    “Getting more strategic”

    → 11:10 AM, Nov 20
  • Terrible name, but awesome tool for working with .docx files in a terminal.

    → 9:56 PM, Aug 27
  • “This quality – of flattery, reinforcement of established beliefs, intellectual passivity, and positive feedback at all costs – is also what irks me most about the behaviour of current models." - this is one of my biggest annoyances too. Lots of other really good content in this post.

    → 11:24 AM, Aug 6
  • A good set of rules for publishing Python packages.

    → 11:04 PM, Aug 3
  • These lessons from 9 years of tricky bugs are interesting. It’s a great idea to make notes on these – I wish I had done that over the last decade or two!

    → 7:52 PM, Aug 3
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