Chris Short
Short Family's Ultimate Holiday Movie Marathon: 29 Holiday Films
A family's curated list of 29 favorite holiday movies featuring classics and animated films that bring seasonal joy and laughter.
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 34
Eli Bendersky
Revisiting "Let's Build a Compiler"
Classic 1988 compiler tutorial translated from Pascal/68000 assembly to Python/WebAssembly to understand its enduring appeal.
Cassidy Williams
Food I recommend in Chicago in 2025
Chicago food guide beyond hot dogs and deep dish pizza, with local dining recommendations for visitors in 2025.
Cassidy Williams
Pausing a CSS animation with getAnimations()
Use getAnimations() to pause CSS animations when needed.
Chris Short
Common Display Resolutions
Reference guide for common display resolutions from 540p to 8K, including pixel dimensions for monitors, TVs, and video formats.
Cassidy Williams
Sewing an e-reader case
Made a simple e-reader case as a first sewing project in a while.
Tim Bray
After the Bubble
GenAI bubble will pop; key concerns are GPU depreciation accounting tricks and how widespread the economic damage will be.
swyx (Shawn Wang)
How To Podcast
Author shares podcasting advice from running 4 shows, focusing on tips for average interview podcasts aiming for success without going full-time. (146 characters)
Cassidy Williams
The ABCD framework for feedback
Framework for getting specific, helpful feedback on your work in a structured way.
Jamie Brandon (Scattered Thoughts)
0056: consulting, zest progress, existentialize, modular borrowing, do we understand sql, zjit updates, books
Blog post covers updates on multiple projects: Zest progress, existentialize, modular borrowing, SQL understanding, and zjit, plus consulting work.
Cassidy Williams
Lasagna and a root beer float
The post asks readers to reflect on which food and drink combination best represents their personality or identity.
Gergely Orosz (Pragmatic Engineer)
Downdetector and the real cost of no upstream dependencies
Downdetector went down during Cloudflare's outage due to a hard dependency that can't be easily removed, highlighting the risks of relying on upstream services.
Chris Short
Pony Famous
"Pony Famous" describes being genuinely famous with fans and influence, but only within a specific niche community rather than mainstream culture.
Cassidy Williams
Goodbye to an 11-year-old Issue
An 11-year-old feature request was finally resolved, evoking nostalgia and emotions about the long journey.
Brendan Gregg
Leaving Intel
Author resigned from Intel after 3.5 years working on AI/GPU performance tools like flame graphs and eBPF, moving to a new opportunity.
Cassidy Williams
The what, how, and why of CSS clamp()
CSS clamp() helps create responsive designs efficiently by setting flexible size values with minimum, preferred, and maximum constraints.
Mitchell Hashimoto
Ghostty Is Now Non-Profit
Ghostty has transitioned to operating as a non-profit organization.
Cassidy Williams
Fix your upgrades and migrations with Codemods
Codemods are automated scripts that transform code to work with newer systems, making upgrades and migrations easier.
Tim Bray
Tracy Numbers
African bell patterns with 12 notes connect to cancer research through combinatorics, exploring circular rhythmic structures called Tracy Numbers.