Perfectly encapsulating the character test
In my house, you just got a spine-freezing talking-to about the various bits of fallout from my mum's self-inflicted garbage fire if a life, dumping big chunks adult-grade anxiety about financial and legal problems on us, and did we want to make things harder.
 expanded into a full-length post:
… and for a long time I didn't need a post like the one I'm about to write. If someone brought up the idea of generating code from specifications I'd share the above image with them and that would usually do the trick.
However, agentic coding advocates claim to have found a way to defy gravity and generate code purely from specification documents. Moreover, they've also muddied the waters enough that I believe the above comic strip warrants additional commentary for why their claims are misleading.
In my experience their advocacy is rooted in two common misconceptions:
- ***Misconception 1:** specification documents are simpler than the
corresponding code*
They lean on this misconception when marketing agentic coding to believers who think of agentic coding as the next generation of outsourcing. They dream of engineers being turned into managers who author specification documents which they farm out to a team of agents to do the work, which only works if it's cheaper to specify the work than to do the work.
- ***Misconception 2:** specification work is more thoughtful tham coding work*
They lean on this misconception when marketing agentic coding to skeptics concerned that agentic coding will produce unmaintainable slop. The argument is that filtering the work through a specification document will improve quality and promote better engineering practices.
I'll break down why I believe those are misconceptions using a concrete
example.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6ouaxjxgcbwzw6porooiafil/bafkreiasrhxo4wthywnve4lqddqlcvan26qu6wjmhh7ozgrqumeg4342te)
preview of an upcoming post
Woof, that's a fair chunk. Raided at all, or are you a gambler?
Anti-fascist == far-left?
I have been up since 4AM patching machines.
Jesus fucking christ update your kernel RIGHT FUCKING NOW, immediately.
it's Extremely Bad.
oh, you want to get angry?
you want to throw things at the screen?
This guy, at 4:50 if the timestamp thing doesn't work.
Lining an oven tray with cling wrap instead of baking paper...
The ‘No Actual Consequences Commission’, by @fionakatauskas.bsky.social
ISTR there was a cloud provider once that didn't include metadata in their pricing, so someone actually came up with a storage strategy based on 0-byte files with 1MB filenames...
#aintevenmad
I find myself at an age where the time I have left seems disappointingly insufficient, but any more than that sounds horrific.
I don't know how that works.
systemd-shibari
your kid is awesome
It will be historically significant that the Albanese government decided to spend its enormous political capital not on addressing systemic inequality but on mindless fealty to the demands of the United States and Israel. That is how it'll be remembered.
I think you just invented adhd
middle management a facade of blatantly faked competence?
the world is upside down
Gotta have the song!!!
YES!
Which is not to say that you need to go all Enterprise Java Hello World about it, of course
in fact, I sometimes wonder if you could improve code quality by banning comments and documentation altogether, then switch devs around a codebase at random intervals, so you *have to* make it inherently understandable, or get lynched...
Unless you're a weird haskell nerd you will need to get to the imperative gubbins soon enough, but you are primarily communicating with some poor schmuck 15 years later, and you need to do a handover from beyond the grave; lead them first and foremost through the *idea* of the code.
3/
It's super easy to get sucked into the imperative, problem-solving stream-of-consciousness 'how' mode when coding, but this can obfuscate the goals and reasoning behind it, no matter how many comments you throw in.
Start with a declarative framing of the big picture, and work your way down.
2/
There's a concept I've been struggling to express concisely for a while now.
In the course of overhauling a hideous ecosystem of 90s-era load-bearing bash and perl scripts, I've realised two major things:
* Documentation and comments are overrated.
* Code primarily needs to show its intent.
1/
The most important programming manual is Strunk and White.
in the great aztec tradition
How is that different from just thickening the sauce with a little flour as you make it?
Jjust becasue a country has a homophobic government, doesn't make it okay to bomb a school full of little girls.
