Sylvain Kerkour
Replacing Plastic with Wool and Titanium
You've probably heard about how (micro)plastics are poisoning everything, from our land and water, to our bodies, and of the absolute malfeasance of the oil industry. Thus, as any reasonable
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 36
antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo)
A new era for software testing
Automatic programming dramatically speeds up writing software in certain use cases and in the right hands. In my experience the output does not reach the structural quality and economy of complexity o
Eli Bendersky
Thoughts on starting new projects with LLM agents
A few months ago I wrote about using LLM agents to help restructuring one of my Python projects. It's worth beginning by saying that the rewrite has been successful by all reasonable measures; I've be
Armin Ronacher
Communities of Not
There is a strange thing that happens in communities that gather around abstinence from something: identity from opposition. At their best these communities are not just negative: childfree spaces ca
Tim Bray
Long Links (AI-free)
Hey everyone, I know you’re overloaded because everything has . Long-form reading or writing or art or music, who’s got time for that? Fortunately there are those who still do and here’s som
Sylvain Kerkour
We are in the golden age of Open Source, surf the wave until it crashes.
While a few people complain that AI is "stealing Open Source", training on Open Source code and giving nothing in return, I'm currently living the complete opposite: we are in
Xe Iaso
IPv6 zones in URLs are a mistake
Run away while you still can, it's not too late for you to avoid the curse of knowledge.
Drew DeVault
The circus freaks of open source
The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects a
Seth Michael Larson
Is the Super Smash Bros. Brawl donut from Mister Donut?
Happy Donut Day (and #FediDonutFriday) to those who celebrate! 🍩 Present and Correct shared a link to the Mister Donut museum on Bluesky and upon clicking through I was greeted with a familiar face:
Alex Kladov (matklad)
CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts
CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts Jun 4, 2026 An ersatz CSS tutorial for people who need to style a web page, but aren’t web developers. I am a wrong person to write this kind of thing, as I have neither th
Andrew Gallant (burntsushi)
Encephalitis
I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. It is an autoimmune disorder where your body’s normally helpful antibodies start acting strangely. This leads to inflammation in the brai