Adam Kemp 

155 Followers
197 Following
1.5K Posts
Software Engineer at Apple
LocationSan Jose
PronounsHe/Him/His
Websitehttp://blog.adamkemp.com
Gravatarhttps://en.gravatar.com/therealadamkemp

This is such a petty leak. Agentic coding tools are new enough that practically everyone is new to them and so there’s no shame in taking training on how to use them.

Siri has its problems but the team behind it going to some boot camp to learn how to use tools like Claude Code isn’t newsworthy.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-sends-siri-staffers-coding-bootcamp-latest-shakeup-organization

Apple Sends Siri Staffers to Coding ‘Bootcamp’ in Latest Shakeup For Organization

Apple is sending a portion of its Siri programmers back to coding school just two months before the company is expected to unveil a major, AI-powered revamp of the voice assistant, people familiar with the team said. The company plans to send a significant chunk of people working on Siri—a group ...

The Information
I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

Thirteen thousand miles. Infinite contenders. One beautiful loaf.

The Atlantic

If all you do in your tech career is:

1. When something is slow, you look carefully at the output of a profiler or a query plan & make measured suggestions about what to improve;

2. When something breaks badly, you gently but insistently ask what & why until you truly know, then the next time similar work is needed you bring up how to avoid doing what broke last time; and

3. When someone lacks info, you make them feel good for learning instead of bad for not knowing;

You will do good work.

Much of the ‘don’t use AI’ discourse doesn’t fully account for the fact that the web has, at this point, largely been ruined by AI slop and, before it, SEO spam.

For example, I’m building a shed with concrete block foundations on gravel pads. Some of the blocks are hollow. Should I fill them with concrete?

Any search for this just produces reams and reams of slop and spam, with advice ranging from ‘absolutely yes and you will die if you don’t because they will not be strong enough and fall apart’ to ‘no that’s a terrible idea they’ll fall apart in winter if you don’t leave them hollow’. Or both in the same ‘article’.

I don’t think the web used to be like this.

Claude gives a nuanced answer that *sounds* true (it’ll make them a bit stronger, but they don’t need to be stronger).

Basically any search for technical advice is similar. The only sources left that give advice from humans are YouTube (and similarly but less good, TikTok etc), the few still-standing web forums, and Reddit. Or books.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@pxlnv/116372944243924470

1) It took me 5 years to build a viable business, and I didn’t spend those 5 years furiously coding. Speed was never the problem.

2) Discussions of AI need to carefully and purposely distinguish professional from personal uses. Too often the distinction is ignored or conflated. I can see the appeal of AI for private projects and for non-coders. But I think that AI is a self-destructive disaster for professional programming (and professional writing of any kind).

Did you hear the story of the one man $1.8 billion business built by AI as portrayed in the @[email protected]? Turns out basically every aspect of that story is bullshit and the story should be retracted.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:l4edfel22exejp7mewt6f3ky/post/3miwdupawep2j
1. A new study claims trans care worsens mental health. It is fatally flawed. It didn't measure mental health—it measured psych visits. Even visits that stemmed from mandatory checkins, surgical pre-psych evals, or pre-treatment that was classified as post. Subscribe to support our journalism.

Fact Check: New Finnish "Study...
Fact Check: New Finnish "Study" Does Not Prove "Trans Youth Care Leads To Worse Outcomes"

The latest Kaltiala study is filled with fatal methodological flaws, and does not support claims made about trans youth care lacking efficacy.

Erin In The Morning
The biggest leadership downgrade in the history of the world.

For software product teams, one role being more productive does not automatically translate to the team being more productive.

Engineers writing 2x - 10x as much code does not translate to 2x - 10x as much revenue or customers. But it does mean 2x - 10x as many bugs. Using AI to do analysis doesn’t help if the output cannot be trusted because it’s frequently incorrect.

So it takes real effort to rework how a team executes so the individual productivity from AI use actually applies to the team

@carnage4life I hope you stick around. I enjoy following you because you have the most balanced thoughts on AI. I appreciate you!