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6 items tagged “steve-yegge”

2024

In the past, these decisions were so consequential, they were basically one-way doors, in Amazon language. That’s why we call them ‘architectural decisions!’ You basically have to live with your choice of database, authentication, JavaScript UI framework, almost forever.

But that’s changing with LLMs, because you can explore, investigate, and even prototype each one so quickly. Even technology migrations are becoming so much easier/cheaper/faster.

These are all examples of increasing optionality.

Steve Yegge, via Gene Kim

# 4th December 2024, 11:35 pm / steve-yegge, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming

The Death of the Junior Developer (via) Steve Yegge's speculative take on the impact LLM-assisted coding could have on software careers.

Steve works on Cody, an AI programming assistant, so he's hardly an unbiased source of information. Nevertheless, his collection of anecdotes here matches what I've been seeing myself.

Steve coins the term here CHOP, for Chat Oriented Programming, where the majority of code is typed by an LLM that is directed by a programmer. Steve describes it as "coding via iterative prompt refinement", and argues that the models only recently got good enough to support this style with GPT-4o, Gemini Pro and Claude 3 Opus.

I've been experimenting with this approach myself on a few small projects (see this Claude example) and it really is a surprisingly effective way to work.

Also included: a story about how GPT-4o produced a bewitchingly tempting proposal with long-term damaging effects that only a senior engineer with deep understanding of the problem space could catch!

I'm in strong agreement with this thought on the skills that are becoming most important:

Everyone will need to get a lot more serious about testing and reviewing code.

# 12th July 2024, 3:34 pm / steve-yegge, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming

2008

The Universal Design Pattern. Steve Yegge presents a small book on key/value pairs and prototypal inheritance. “I call it the Universal design pattern because it is (by far) the best known solution to the problem of designing open-ended systems, which in turn translates to long-lived systems.”

# 20th October 2008, 11:13 pm / keyvaluepairs, programming, prototypes, steve-yegge

XML is better if you have more text and fewer tags. And JSON is better if you have more tags and less text. Argh! I mean, come on, it's that easy. But you know, there's a big debate about it.

Steve Yegge

# 15th June 2008, 6:09 pm / json, steve-yegge, xml

2007

Size Is The Enemy. Jeff Atwood: “I’ve started a cottage industry mining Steve [Yegge]’s insanely great but I-hope-you-have-
an-hour-to-kill writing and condensing it into its shorter form points.” Lots of verbose static typing apologists in the comments.

# 24th December 2007, 10:50 am / dynamiclanguages, java, jeff-atwood, python, statictyping, steve-yegge

2006

Good Agile, Bad Agile. Includes interesting insight in to Google development processes.

# 27th September 2006, 3:10 pm / agile, google, process, steve-yegge