Jessitron

As I’m working with an agent to upgrade a repo from vibe-coded to something I can understand and dig into, I am reminded that Programming is Theory Building. By “theory” we mean: an understanding of the world, the software and how they relate that’s good enough to let us work intelligently on them, answer questions about them, and argue about them. Like: we have a theory about what the world needs (I need to be able to comment on this HTML!), how the software meets those needs (a server injects…

I’m reading more of Hartmut Rosa’s narrative of Social Acceleration. Paraphrasing: It made sense to have a stable, personal identity when the pace of social change meshed with the change of generations; this is a marker of classical modernity (like, 1800-1970). Before that, and in traditional societies with slower rates of social change, people find themselves defined by pre-existing, enduring structures–an intergenerational identity. After that, in a super-fast-changing society like late…

This is based on my keynote at RubyConf 2026. They’ll publish a video eventually, I hope. There’s a philosopher in Naples, Italy, way back in the 1700s who understood something important to software today. Giambattista Vico lived early in the Enlightenment, when mathematical and experimental thinking were all the rage. René Des Cartes and Francis Bacon were the hotness. People were all about, what can we know for certain through logic alone? Vico said, wait. All that math is great, but it is…

The other day I read about this Italian philosopher from like 1700 who coined a phrase: verum esse ipsum factum. What is true is what is made, or: we only really understand what we created. Verum Factum: we only really know what we made. This resonates immediately as a software developer. When I wrote a program, or when I’ve changed it enough, I feel like I know it, like it’s under my fingers. It’s a particular feeling of knowing. It means I have confidence that I can predict the software, that…

This is what I want to know when I get to know someone. What is the experience of being alive in your body, in your world? This is the definition of consciousness: there is something it is like to be you. Erik Hoel contrasts this with LLMs, speculating there is nothing it is like to be two matrices multiplying. This is why humans can be responsible and accountable for things. Our actions have consequences that we can feel, that we can’t help but feel, for decades. What I do changes what it is…

TL;DR: Attribute. More information on one event gives us more correlation power. It’s also cheaper. When you want to add some information to your tracing telemetry, you could emit a log, create a span, or add a piece of data to your current span. Adding a piece of data to your current span is the best! Usually. Attributes are the best, and also the cheapest. If you have request name, user ID, request properties, feature flags, and notes about what happened in a single event, then you can…

We used to type code to tell the computer what to do. When that gets tedious, we made libraries and functions until the code was more communicative. Now I type English words to tell the agent what to tell the computer what to do. Sometimes that gets tedious, and then I need to find new ways to make it easier. Here’s an example. Iterating could be easier. The work: I’m getting Claude to build a program that turns Claude conversation logs into a vertical HTML comic. As we iterate on this, I ask…

Today I looked at the first PR on our new project repo. It added a new run script, but the README didn’t mention it. The proposed change was incomplete, because the documentation was out of sync. Did I comment on the PR? heck no. I want to fix this problem for all PRs, not just ... Read moreAdding Correctness Conditions to Code Changes

Today, a quick example of introducing determinism when an AI struggles. I give it a simple instruction, it screws it up, I tell it to write a program to do things right.