Xe Iaso
Vibe Coding Trip Report: Making a sponsor panel
I needed to ship this before my surgery, so I vibe coded it. It turned out well enough.
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
View all daily digests →Latest Articles
antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo)
GNU and the AI reimplementations
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. A sentence that I never really liked, and what is happening with AI, about software projects reimplementations, shows all the limits of s
Xe Iaso
Using Clankers to Help Me Process Surgery
At 4 AM in recovery, the machines that never sleep turned out to be exactly the right company.
Xe Iaso
Advice for staying in the hospital for a week
Hard-won wisdom from a week of fluorescent lights and beeping machines.
Cassidy Williams
Making art with CSS gradients and corner-shape and skew, oh my
I combined some fun CSS techniques to make a little diving board drawing!
Tim Bray
Because Algospeak
Recently I read by and by . The language we speak (and text) to each other is at the core of who and what we are, and the Internet is the strongest among the forces that channel
Gergely Orosz (Pragmatic Engineer)
The Pulse: Cloudflare rewrites Next.js as AI rewrites commercial open source
An engineer at Cloudflare rewrote most of Vercel’s Next.js in one week with AI agents. It looks like a sign of how AI will disrupt existing moats and business models. Analysis
Martin Fowler
Ideological Resistance to Patents, Followed by Reluctant Pragmatism
Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with the practical constraints faced by startups, led him to resort to
Sylvain Kerkour
Using Rust and Postgres for everything: patterns learned over the years
I love simple, boring and reliable tools. In the software world, the two best are without a doubt Rust and PostgreSQL. One example: a backend service I'm working on processes
Alex Kladov (matklad)
JJ LSP Follow Up
JJ LSP Follow Up Mar 5, 2026 In Majjit LSP, I described an idea of implementing Magit style UX for jj once and for all, leveraging LSP protocol. I’ve learned today that the upcoming 3.18 version of L
Armin Ronacher
AI And The Ship of Theseus
Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a differe