AI has democratized who can do a thing but it hasn’t made creating a thing useful, safe, and delightful any less rare compared to talking about a thing, doing a thing poorly, making it miserable to use, or harming the people who use it. To be clear, I don’t blame robots for this.
Ken Judy
@kenjudy
- 24 Followers
- 14 Following
- 425 Posts
Father, husband, technologist, advisor, coach. Interested in sustainability, responsible use of technology, and renewables.
Reports say Amazon is mandating human code reviews by senior engineers on AI generated code to reduce failures in production.
Several questions:
Aren’t you just offsetting the time spent in an activity senior engineers find engaging (writing good coding) with one they generally detest (reading bad code)?
Who actually learns and gets better in this cycle?
Don’t PR reviews mainly catch maintainability issues not bugs?
Learn faster than before. Work harder than before. I accept the economic imperatives of the developer world. I can crash hours and I can reflect, learn, and master new things. But not necessarily at the same time and not without downtime.
AI simplifies complicated tasks. That ease of use masks complexity. People already fail to grasp the unintuitive and unpredictable nature of abstract tasks like building safe, effective software. The challenge is not just adapting change it’s communicating what has not changed.
At the Monet Venice exhibit at Brooklyn Museum. The paintings only make sense when viewed from far enough back that technique gives way to the feel of mist, light, and water. I got that in gap tooth patches as crowds threaded by at touching distance from the canvases - losing forest for trees.
My first thoughts in any leadership role is who is my team. Who are my partners. Who are my advocates. Who can I really trust to do their job well, to focus on collective success, and be candid with me. That’s everything. Full stop.
People are working on disciplined practices to improve the code produced in collaboration with ai agents. People send me links to projects all the time and I thank you for that.
I’d also appreciate links to any research quantifying the impact of these practices on delivery speed and code quality.
In a working session where I reflect upon how age, experience, mortality are one with judgement, ease, and craft, I put Chris Cornell on shuffle.
Claude code, Github, and Obsidian editor are my goto document management solution. Having great success producing deep and broad analysis quickly using these tools where we have to work from outlines, capture notes, understand and process a lot of written context.
Success requires a deliberate practice and a personal commitment that every word that appears in a final draft is verifiably true or qualified with attribution and written or reviewed and copy edited to the word by a human.
As my mom grew older, she dreamed of her mother. She saw it as a visitation and a comfort.
Now I grow older. I dream of my mother. I rather see it as a gift of the mind. Letting me sit beside the aging in me at an arms remove. To contemplate it with awe, fear, sadness, but with a bit of grace.