TDD, BDD, DDD, Agile, SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, XP… there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat write code in a professional environment.

I take pride in being a person who is a non-ideologue when it comes to my code. There are many good ways of working, and they are all context-dependent.

You can’t apply the same things that worked when you were a two-person startup operating out of the proverbial garage and expect them to work once your hypothetical unicorn has reached a thousand-plus developers. Even within the same organisation, processes that work for one team can be catastrophic when applied to their neighbouring team.

This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked.

The rise of Whatever - eevee

This is probably the best post about LLMs I’ve read, which is probably why I’m the millionth person to share it. It really sums up my emotional reaction to their meteoric rise: “ew”, basically.

The power of the argument is that it identifies a theme that runs through recent tech changes, of which LLMs are just the latest and greatest example: the lack of care for quality, and the realisation from Big Tech that consumers mostly are fine with mediocre output.

Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks.

You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing momentum, confidence, and ultimately, the argument.

One of my close friends won international debate competitions for fun while we were at university (he’s now a successful criminal barrister), and he told me that the only trick in the book, once you boil it all down, is to make sure the conversation is framed in your terms. Once that happens, it’s all over bar the shouting.