Martin Fowler
Bliki: Agentic Email
I've heard a number of reports recently about people setting up LLM agents to work on their email and other communications. The LLM has access to the user's email account, reads all the emails, de
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
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Martin Fowler
Harness Engineering
Birgitta Böckeler explains why OpenAI's recent write-up on Harness Engineering is a valuable framing of a key activity in AI-enabled software development. The harness includes context engi
swyx (Shawn Wang)
Take a hard game, and make it shorter
You are of course aware that attention spans are shrinking. YouTube -> Shorts, Instagram Reels, Tiktoks, etc have taken over the world.
Tim Bray
Open Source and GenAI?
I’ve been puttering away on my project since 2023. In the last few weeks GenAI has intervened. describes a series of Claude-generated human-curated PRs, most of which I’ve now appr
Stephen Diehl
Can Opus 4.6 do Category Theory in Lean?
Can Opus 4.6 do Category Theory in Lean? I have a little category theory library I've been dragging around for about a decade now. It started life in Haskell, got ported to Agda, briefly lived in Idri
Alex Kladov (matklad)
Diagnostics Factory
Diagnostics Factory Feb 16, 2026 In Error Codes For Control Flow, I explained that Zig’s strongly-typed error codes solve the “handling” half of error management, leaving “reporting” to the users. To
Armin Samii
Bristol, Day Two
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