Sylvain Kerkour
Git commit prompt injection
It's now common knowledge that LLMs / AI agents are vulnerable to all kind of injections, so attackers are being more and more creative to find new entrypoints. One commonly
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 35
Seth Michael Larson
Linting is important for code review: screen included
Today I was reviewing a pull request for some Python code when I saw a semicolon in the diff. Screenshot provided below, which as we all know is the best way to share text on the internet: I was
Sylvain Kerkour
Announcing stdx, Rust's extended standard library: simplicity, performance and supply chain security for everyone
From embedded firmware (where it's badly needed) to big servers passing by cross-platform applications used by billions of people, the foundations of the computing stack are being rewritten in Rust.
Seth Michael Larson
Are insecure code completions a vulnerability?
Three months ago I saw that PyCharm shipped with a “Full Line Completion” plugin that “uses a local deep learning model to suggest entire lines of code”. These suggestions manifest as whole-line sugge
Armin Ronacher
Gaslighting Openness
I have been a staunch supporter of Open Source for a long time, including experiments in funding it. I’m a true believer in the idea that Open Source always wins in the long run, but not automatically
Sylvain Kerkour
A new monorepo architecture for Rust
I've just saw a project using the dreaded monorepo architecture: service1-package1/ service1-package2/ service1-package3/ ... service2-package1/ service2-package2/ ... I don't like it because packages
Tim Bray
Long Links (AI)
The piece you’re now looking at exists because curation of interesting not-lightweight material included quite a few focused on our dominant malaise, namely you-know-what, I mean it’s in the