Tim Bray
Quamina + Claude, Case 2
I described a bunch of incremental-improvement PRs from a colleague working with Claude Opus. Today I want to talk about Rishi Baldawa’s , a Claude-based port of Quamina from Go to Rust.
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 - Page 8
Alex Kladov (matklad)
Justifying text-wrap: pretty
Justifying text-wrap: pretty Feb 14, 2026 p { text-wrap: pretty; } Something truly monumental happened in the world of software development in 2025. Safari shipped a reasonable implementation of te
Martin Fowler
Fragments: February 13
I’ve been busy traveling this week, visiting some clients in the Bay Area and attending The Pragmatic Summit. So I’ve not has as much time as I’d hoped to share more thoughts from the Thoughtworks Fut
Armin Ronacher
The Final Bottleneck
Historically, writing code was slower than reviewing code. It might not have felt that way, because code reviews sat in queues until someone got around to picking it up. But if you compare the actual
Filippo Valsorda
Inspecting the Source of Go Modules
Code hosts like GitHub don't necessarily show the correct source of Go modules. pkg.geomys.dev is a new convenient viewer for module source.
Andrej Karpathy
microgpt
.post-header h1 { font-size: 35px; } .post pre, .post code { background-color: #fcfcfc; font-size: 13px; /* make code smaller for this post... */ } This is a brief guide to my new art pr
Xe Iaso
The Discourse has been Automated
An AI agent submitted a PR to matplotlib, got rejected, and then wrote a callout blogpost attacking the maintainer. I have no idea how to feel about this.
Seth Michael Larson
Automated public shaming of open source maintainers
This is a follow-up to “New era of slop security reports for open source”. Matplotlib, the unfortunate target of this new type of harassment, publishes a clear generative AI use policy. That boundary