Brilliant, the youth is not completely lost.

😍

#ai #punk #GenAlpha

There are two kinds of productivity systems.

The first makes you feel like a more sophisticated person than you are.

The second actually helps you do the work.

We keep building the first because the second leaves us alone with the rather terrifying idea that it's actually up to us...

https://www.selfonomics.com/p/how-i-run-a-solo-6-figure-agency

AI is shifting the economics of software development so much. 2 examples:

1. I stopped teaching ATDD because product people generally preferred to react to what they didn't want than declare what they did and the connection between human language & code was too fragile.

2. I encountered Clean Room in the 90s, but dismissed it as impractical for consumer packaged software.

Both are having a moment now because declaring intentions is now the bottleneck. FASCINATING.

I saw someone mention this article titled "The quiet grief of adult friendship", but lost the original toot when the power went out.

It's a short but poignant read.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/civil-irony/the-quiet-grief-of-adult-friendship/

The work you're trying to do hasn't been done yet because you haven't done it. Nobody else will do it for you. The route is through, not around.

In a few hundred years, someone might transcribe your work by hand to understand how it holds together.

That's not a bad goal, actually.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/how-to-be-inspired-without-copying/

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.

I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).

It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.

The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.

We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.

I worry.

A fascist paradigm

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/#paradigmatic

<- Cory Doctorow on how to apply Dana Meadows's "systems thinking" to the resurgence of fascism