Simon Willison
Running Python ASGI apps in the browser via Pyodide + a service worker
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 38
Sylvain Kerkour
DeepSeek + Rust = ❤️
Hey, you, I wanted to share a secret. I've got extraordinary results using DeepSeek v4 over the last week for programming tasks, especially Rust. I've done work that would have
Ned Batchelder
Snake way for ducklings
This is the mascot for Boston Python. It’s called Snake Way for Ducklings: My son Ben drew it, which makes me very happy. He also drew Sleepy Snake. Wearing this image on a shirt around PyCon, I h
Seth Michael Larson
How much “Super Mario” per year?
It's impossible to objectively quantify art, but we try anyway. For example: Is “Super Mario” a good video-game franchise? Looking at review scores, Super Mario includes some of the most universally-a
Sylvain Kerkour
Building an AI-proof career
One of my core beliefs is that a great amount of humanity's miseries have their roots in people and organizations refusing to adapt to an ever-changing world. The evolution of
Eli Bendersky
Notes on Fourier series
The trigonometric Fourier series is a beautiful mathematical theory that shows how to decompose a periodic function into an infinite sum of sinusoids. These are my notes on the subject, with some exam
Xe Iaso
Dancing mad with sandboxing
Kefka is a Go-native shell sandbox with coreutils, Python via WebAssembly, and more. Learn the works of madness that went into making this happen!
Luca Palmieri
Work
I work with engineering teams that need senior, hands-on technical leadership for reliable backend systems. My strongest fit is where the work spans multiple levels at once: code quality, architecture
Martin Fowler
Fragments: May 27
At the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen in 2025, Kent Beck and I spent some time on stage talking and answering questions from the audience - a format I refer to as “two old geezers on a park bench”. We
Martin Fowler
The test suite as a regression sensor
Birgitta Böckeler finishes her post on sensors for coding agents by examining the role of a test suite as a regression sensor, focusing on the role mutation testing can play. more…
Martin Fowler
The VibeSec Reckoning
Vibe coding has significantly accelerated software prototyping but AI agents frequently recommend insecure configurations, creating security problems. Gautam Koul, Lucian Moss, Neil Drew-L