Ana Hevesi

Thinking is invisible labor. Collaboration is invisible labor

This is one of my favorite things to wonder.

It’s as if software is also a place, and our experience of that place is collaboratively negotiated, and our behaviors are in part determined by its design. 😜

“I am capable of playing only one game at a time. I will chastise you for the asymmetry, even if it hurts us both.”

The way AI is making craters out of the holes we already had in our definition of software creation is interesting as hell.

@raymyers.bsky.social and I have had some good conversations on “WTF even is software engineering?!”. Bet he’d enjoy this piece too

“this stuff works best for side projects” is an interesting premise worth proving or disproving

It’s interesting. My expertise is in getting users and companies to co-create better products, so theres a whole world where “we don’t have a use case yet” is completely normal and fine. But people don’t realize how easy this can be, and tie themselves in knots to dodge a terrifying conundrum

“use cases haven't actually been defined prior to selling it”

gdi Cat I am already dangerously close to starting a newsletter because I am plagued by too many unhinged thoughts about all this

(But really, thank you ❤️)

Metrics are always the result of important, harder to measure things about people’s experience that are driving behavior.

The numbers can be useful, but they’re never the whole story.

The map is not the terrain.

peace be with you, my friend

This btw is what makes me lolsob whenever dev tools founders fall into the trap of thinking a good enough tool will get adopted by itself.

Every codebase is an emergent communal reality and a reflection of our relationships, codified in behavior you can run an infinite number of times.

Wondering if we might consider wising up to this?

I think the single most important skill you can have online right now is being able to ask the question “is this person a journalist or a content creator” and then knowing what to do with that difference

This is one of the most important questions of our time, and tangling with it requires an almost scary amount of imagination and hope.

I’ve been working to nurture, clarify, and sustain this frame for fifteen years. I know how much it asks people to let go of.

“Software as a medium of becoming” is a really beautiful phrase. It describes the work I aspire to.

I’ve done research interviews with eng & product leaders whose teams work with large quantities of agent-generated code.

Can confirm that tooling, practices, or some combination thereof are deeply necessary in a new world where LOC are shockingly cheap to produce.

Halsey’s collaboration with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is the best Halloween album ever made

Do not @ me

So you’ve had a lot of time to meditate on this clip, huh?

Oof, yeah. “There is an order to things. Please tell me real quick how you fit into it so I know how I fit into it.”

And like, homie

what if there is no spoon?

Next time someone asks me if I’m technical I should just say:

“I don’t know. Are you?”

An era of adversarial unknowing

keeping it in the group chat

I’ve fallen in love with Becky Chambers’ work this year and have very nearly chewed through every book there is.

If I’m a fan of Chambers, what do I read next? I am about to enter withdrawal, please send help.

We really did contain multitudes. And sometimes that looked like the narcissism of small differences dialed to 11 ✨

Related

bsky.app/profile/grim...

But I do think a lot about how that narrative was propagated, how deeply it lodged itself in our shared consciousness, and what we can make next.

You could play the same game, but be running on different fuel.

If you were a long-time contributor, the fuel you were running on usually changed over time because (lol) humans are not fixed.

Obviously it wasn’t all bad, people were using the platform in some of the most prosocial ways the internet has ever seen.

The system allowed many people to act while being rooted in many different intentions.

It’s not that Stack Overflow originated the idea that some of us have special programmer brains and others don’t

it's just that we gamified the performance of it.

Nothing like thumbing through fifteen years of hard-won lessons in a field no one’s wanted to take seriously so they can be distilled down into useful advice for folks without the same experience to make me question my very will to live.

(I’m fine, I’m fine. But hahaha jfc)