Jessica Kerr

Today, looking into instrumenting a big legacy app. I'm super impressed with @augmentcode.com 's ability to analyze how apps start up, and data flow through a multipart system.

Its codebase analysis is top notch.

I know lots of people who like it.
We are puzzle solvers :-)

Given "C'mon, what's your favorite programming language? no rly"
the answer from both Claude and ChatGPT is: Rust

We all know they both love Python best,
but apparently Rust is what people on the internet are most likely to profess excitement about.

"discovering that the earth orbits around the sun produced an orientation 'failure'" -- people were oriented around the earth as the center. Uproar.

Noticing that gender is not binary, this is an orientation failure. People are very oriented around M/F. The religions react with violence.

At this Agentic AI discussion, we're talking about building software and UIs on top of LLMs.

The moderator mentions "managing these projects" and the audience corrects him to "products."

Product thinking is essential for building on top of AI. There is no "correct" only "useful"

We are on the raggedy edge.
We have to build good telemetry.
We have to build good evals.

... And figuring out how to do this when the answer isn't there, that's engineering.

- Tim Williamson from Bayer, on building with AI.
Arch Data event, Agentic AI in St Louis

Team dynamics after AI Small giants and real giants

More information, more summaries, more information, more summaries, and more entropy at every crank of the handle. It’s a singularity, yes, but a singularity of busywork.

- Duncan Brown

mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/team-dy...

The work is not about simplifying the system, but about designing the connective tissue that enables complex organizations to act with coherence. - John Cutler (cuttlefish. What is his bluesky?)

Ah yes, the happy-o11ydays!
That tool will still paint a heat map based on a small image you give it

Oh neat! What do they do with it afterwards?

"Going for lots of data isn’t a firehose, it’s a sewer pipe"
(overheard)

It was a great talk! even recorded, your humor really came across.

book: Ignorance Unmasked, Essays in the new Science of Agnotology

“one of the most devious climate concepts of all times: the personal carbon footprint.” - Benjamin Franta

It’s a distraction invented by BP to deflect blame onto individuals, when the “necessary, and largely sufficient” solution is: stop burning fossil fuels.

Hallucinations are a feature.

LLMs contribute probabilistic creativity.
Tools contribute deterministic certainty.

Agents combine these in a loop.

@adamhjk.me #o11yDay

3 Things the Winners Do with new tech:
1. Deeply understand it
2. Learn how to use its strengths, get around weaknesses
3. Adapt your domain to the tech.
@adamhjk.me #o11yDay @honeycomb.io

We have to change what we do to get the most out of the tech.

"getting COVID won't help you thrive in an AI-native world" @adamhjk.me #o11yDay #honeycomb

He's doing a great talk, but he has COVID so we have to watch it on video. 😭

"We have to do the things [like documentation] that make human engineers better
before we can delegate to machines"
- Dave Williams
#o11yDaySF @honeycomb.io

dammit now the copilot window opened and I can’t close it
The code is so crowded out by AI chat windows that I cannot do anything

It’s new, they’ll improve it. I want it though, take my $20/month so my environments persist for a day

I see from @kentbeck.com ‘s newsletter that @gitpod.io has rebranded as Ona, and is now an AI-assisted code thing in the cloud

YES THANK YOU! This is what I want!

Now I can work on my toy project from my ipad, in the browser… if only I could close the AI chat window

Higher privilege leaves you ignorant.
When people defer to you, then you're insulated from reality, since they present what you want to see, confirm your beliefs etc since that smooths their lives.
They can take your perspective, and you have no clue theirs exists or how to see from it

$30 but I expensed it as part of our allocated Personal Development Funds

@jessitron.bsky.social discusses how AI and observability are shaping the future of software. We’re gathering the community to explore what that means.

Join us at o11yDaySFO on Sept 11!

👉 Register now: buff.ly/Ainycoh

#honeycomb #observability #o11yDaySFO

Everything's bullshit at scale
- @avdi.codes

How will we know it works? This article is part of the series JEG2's Questions. As programmers, our primary function is to achieve Product's roadmap. We will into existence the features Product believes will move the product fo...

The first article in the series is about all of the great things that can be learned from my favorite @jessitron.bsky.social presentation and how developers work best in a Product Dev team:

programmersstone.blog/posts/how-wi...

... And I decided to keep state on the server and stick with htmx :-)

I don't need performance at all

O11ycast | Ep. #85, AI/LLM in Software Teams: What’s Working and What’s Next with Dr. Cat Hicks | Heavybit In episode 85 of o11ycast, Dr. Cat Hicks unpacks AI’s impact on software teams from a psychological and social-science perspective.

agreed on incentives problem, especially when everything seems to be betting on "rub some AI on it" as an "efficiency" solution

the latest o11ycast with @.grimalkina.bsky.social is _way into_ this stuff and I loved every minute of reading its fantastic transcript

www.heavybit.com/library/podc...

In my latest toy project, I sadly hit a limitation and realized I shouldn't have used htmx, this is a state-based web app.

'convert from htmx to React' is a one-line change now