Simon Willison
Introducing Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they’ve built
No summary available.
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
View all daily digests →Latest Articles - Page 24
Martin Fowler
Fragments: February 9
Some more thoughts from last week’s open space gathering on the future of software development in the age of AI. I haven’t attributed any comments since we were operating under the Chatham House Rule,
Ned Batchelder
EdText
I have a new small project: edtext provides text selection and manipulation functions inspired by the classic ed text editor. I’ve long used cog to build documentation and HTML presentations. Cog inte
Armin Ronacher
A Language For Agents
Last year I first started thinking about what the future of programming languages might look like now that agentic engineering is a growing thing. Initially I felt that the enormous corpus of pre-exis
Marc Brooker
You Are Here
You Are Here Where to next? The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero. The cost of integrating services and libraries, the plumbing of the code w
Xe Iaso
Zendesk, get your shit together please
BORN TO GET SPAMMED, WORLD IS A FUCK, SPAMHAUS THEM ALL 2026, I am inbox full man, 410,757,864,530 Zendesk emails
Simon Willison
Running Pydantic's Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly
No summary available.
Tim Bray
Quamina + Claude, Case 1
With 47 years of coding under my belt, and still a fascination for the new shiny, obviously I’m interested what role (if any) GenAI is going to play in the future of software. But not interested
Brendan Gregg
Why I joined OpenAI
The staggering and fast-growing cost of AI datacenters is a call for performance engineering like no other in history; it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet. I have joined Op