Mastodawn

@elizayer You gave me an idea: maybe it's because writing code is still seen as this mystical dark art that needs to be wrestled from the hands of those creepy wizards, pardon, programmers. A magic mirror on the wall that never says "you can't do that" is just the thing.

Show thread

Elizabeth Ayer 8h ago

The fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.

There is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It’s the opposite.

All we are seeing is decreases in quality, because 👏 code 👏 creation 👏 is not 👏 the problem.

Show thread

Elizabeth Ayer 8h ago

So why are we still trying to optimize code creation?

For decades, people with power - executives and product people - have been shifting the blame for strategy failures and poor market insight onto development "productivity."

This AI moment should be incredibly clarifying. Like, it should be the reductio ad absurdum of a productivity-centric approach.

Elizabeth Ayer 8h ago

I'm a big fan of this explanation/rant from Andrew Murphy.

Taken as a whole, there are many bottlenecks in a corporate software development process. The "load-bearing" calendar is a great example!

Speeding up code creation just increases pressure on the bottleneck, which decreases throughput.

https://andrewmurphy.io/blog/if-you-thought-the-speed-of-writing-code-was-your-problem-you-have-bigger-problems

If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems | Debugging Leadership

AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy cultures, and an org chart that needs six meetings to decide what colour the button should be.

Debugging Leadership

Elizabeth Ayer 1d ago

RE: https://social.edu.nl/@steltenpower/116342224146719123

You had me at the title!

It's talking wayyy left, all the way to standards development.

In fact, it's a nice little infomercial for the paper "Making technical standards work for humanity: New pathways for incorporating international human rights into standards development for
digital technologies"

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/civicspace/resources/civic-space-study-tech-standard-setting.pdf

Elizabeth Ayer 3d ago

Andrew Nesbitt 3d ago

People talking about the leaked claude code release has terrible code, it looks pretty standard for the closed source javascript applications I've seen, vibe coded or not!

Elizabeth Ayer 5d ago

I think in gov tech we're now long past the whole, "it's not a sprint, it's a marathon" thing.

It's clearly chessboxing.

Oof.

Elizabeth Ayer 6d ago

Love the renewed attention on Audre Lorde's The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.

Bonus reminder: Black feminists have a lot of solid observations on cross-functional teams!

https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/communication/masters-tools-will-never-dismantle-masters-house-oct-29-1979

Show thread

Elizabeth Ayer Mar 28

It was obvious enough to previous political generations that biased outcomes were something to be fixed.

And that they should be fixed, even if you couldn’t spot exactly where the biases had affected the process.

Equal opportunity was seen as American, not leftist.

Elizabeth Ayer Mar 28

Just your regular reminder that it was not the left who brought equality of opportunity *in* to party-politics. It was the right who kicked it *out* of the agreed social contract.

For example, it was under Ronald Reagan that a Democratic House and Republican Senate enacted the first Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) clause in law to try to redress imbalances in government contracting.

Blog	https://medium.com/@ElizAyer
Website	https://elizabeth-ayer.com/