Martin Fowler
Maintainability sensors for coding agents
In her recent article about harness engineering for coding agent users, Birgitta Böckeler laid out a mental model for expanding a coding agent harness: a system of guides and sensors that
Daily Digest
Why TDD and AI coding tools exploit the same psychological flaws
Drew DeVault draws a provocative parallel between Test-Driven Development cults and GenAI adoption, arguing both exploit developers' psychological need to feel competent while potentially undermining actual code quality.
- TDD's hidden influence on architecture: While ensuring test coverage, TDD shapes codebases to be "testable" rather than well-designed, and provides no guarantee that passing tests verify the right behavior for actual user needs.
- The dopamine trap of development metrics: Both TDD's green test suites and AI's rapid output create addictive feedback loops through coverage percentages, CI badges, and productivity metrics that make developers feel competent regardless of actual code quality.
- AI coding agents as the new performance theater: GenAI tools let mediocre programmers experience the rush of 10x developer productivity, building "cathedrals" quickly that have beautiful test coverage but rotten foundations underneath.
- The psychological cost of shortcuts: Developers chase these tools despite knowing the externalities (environmental costs, job displacement) because the feeling of finally being "great" at programming overrides long-term concerns.
#tdd-psychology#ai-code-generation#developer-productivity-metrics#software-testing-culture#programming-dopamine-loops
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antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo)
Alternatives for the EDIT tool of LLM agents
EDIT: of course this was already done in the past! I had little doubts but people just confirmed me about it on Twitter :) But, keep reading: the CRC32 compromise at the end is an interesting tradeoff
Alex Kladov (matklad)
Always Be Blaming
Always Be Blaming May 18, 2026 A few tips on 4D-ing your code comprehension skills. I wrote on the importance of reading code before: Look Out For Bugs My default approach to reading is “predictive”:
Marc Brooker
What's Easy Now? What's Hard Now?
What’s Easy Now? What’s Hard Now? This is the fourth in a series about how AI is changing software development, after It’s time to be right., What about juniors?, and My heuristics are wrong. What n
swyx (Shawn Wang)
AIE Singapore: The Agentic Nation
i gave a little talk as closing keynote for the first AI Engineer Singapore. burned some bridges but said what i felt.
swyx (Shawn Wang)
AIE Singapore: The Agentic Nation
i gave a little talk as closing keynote for the first AI Engineer Singapore. burned some bridges but said what i felt.
Drew DeVault
Add an LLM policy for rust-lang/rust
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics: Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs The environmental impact of LLMs Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output Moral judge
Julia Evans
Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
Hello! 8 years ago, I wrote excitedly about discovering Tailwind. At that time I really had no idea how to structure my CSS code and given the choice between a pile of complete chaos and Tailwind, I w