Ana Hevesi

Great day for going ham on my drum machine

Okay but now that we've made computing systems that can make clusters of words and simulate human reasoning, what are we as humans doing to stay grounded and sane through this? 🤔

Because dawg

we like to think we're pure cognition but our human reality is also physical, emotional, and biological

New project day 😀

*MacGyver, ofc

This one was such a treat

I've been adamant for years that yes, there may be defaults to how LLM-powered tools are designed, but we don't have to accept the wrong constraints

We can McGyver these things into shapes that serve human-centered goals

My love language is remembering whether you use Spotify or Apple Music and sending you tracks on the right platform

Having hope is scary. Recognizing there’s a job to do is scary

the reality that your users have an inner world and your product's impact on it influences your success is hella inconvenient so

But every codebase is still a commons where the resource of attention needs to be negotiated

That being flipped over from “this is tenuously sorta held together” to “our shared reality is in shambles” is going to create some difficult emotions

I say this as someone who’s benefited enormously from Claude Code. I’m not anti-agent coding by any stretch

And IMO the code was always an approximation of what matters, not the thing itself

Okay but have we talked about how codebases were some of the last really rich online communities and them being flooded with AI-generated code presents an enormous sense of loss…?

Nailed it

Now entering the stage of conference talk prep where I'm wondering just what it is I've put myself up to

WE ARE SO BACK BABY!

The City We Became - Wikipedia

NK Jemisin’s The City We Became is the truest depiction I’ve seen in any piece of media

Never mind that it’s a fantasy novel

When people say they’re thinking about moving to NY, I tell them to read this

“This is what will help you understand the place”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cit...

The place can be hard. It’s so hard

Personally I grew up there without a wall of money to protect me

I’ve seen the knife’s edge under the glitter. Stared into the cracks, almost fallen in

But most of the sharpest edges come from those who would encounter this shared humanity and push it away

The richness and cultural variation is gorgeous

Stellar bagels baked by a Buddhist from Thailand

A Black woman from Mississippi who can school me on every variety of Chinese dumpling Flushing has to offer

When you understand how much joy, pain, creativity, novelty can exist at once when you walk less than a mile, it changes you

The best part is how those ingredients interrelate to make something new. Constant conversation

They don't stay tidy, they don't stay distinct. Nor should they

Oh dang, I missed this too

I love New York, the city I was raised in, for more reasons than I can count

but one of those is that every second of every day is living, experiential proof the world contains multitudes

So many things are true at once

I’ve watched people do it

Accelerated iteration without judgment and oversight is a massive liability

We’re likely entering an era where the meta skills of changing gears in one day—from running agents to discerning if they’ve done the right thing for users—are what we have to practice

A lot of the SREs in my life sure think so. This fwiw is why I’m so interested in instigating human collaboration around agent output (i.e. the pair prompting sessions I’ve been facilitating). Shared human sense-making of agent output is absolutely necessary to get durable org-level results

It should be faster to stop killing people than to stop feeding them.

To be fair, the folks I was interviewing were often recognizing and holding these in tension, trying reconcile one with the other, glue work people as they were

But also yes

The acceleration of code production, and even code correctness,
aren’t absolving us from the need to create actual software businesses

And as Simon is saying, the economics of the former might even be intensifying how badly we need to return to the latter

It takes skills and practices that are mostly a lost art

Whether or not you’ve built something useful for someone doesn’t live in any automated checks

It lives in their hearts, minds, motivations

This is wildly inconvenient, and you would not believe the gymnastics people perform to avoid it

And like, as an industry we’ve forgotten long ago that if software does useful things for people, they will pay money for it. And that making code is distinct from making things useful enough for people to pay for. And that there are ways of making sure one does the other, but it’s really hard…

The practices @simonwillison.net is spotlighting here are fascinating, but this bit grabbed me (see screenshot)

Using new methodologies to do QA and affirm user stories is great, but that doesn’t mean you’re building a product people want

Only talking to humans will confirm that

I’ve done research with EMs and PMs where one or more members of the dev team is heavily using agent coding tools, sometimes 10xing the lines of code produced in a week.

Can confirm code review is the biggest quandary

Yes, and I’d put a lot of that on the excessively individualistic frame built into the world these organizations were a part of going back 50+ years as well