Are you one of those developers that hates debuggers and stack traces, and would rather spend three hours looking at the output or adding prints for something that would take 5 minutes to any sane developer?

This is very much a tangent, and was asked in bad faith, but I’ll answer anyways!

One of the interesting things about working on distributed systems, is that you can reproduce problems without having to reproduce or mock a long stack trace

So I certainly don’t see the case you’re talking about where it takes hours to reproduce or understand a problem without a debugger. Of course there are still many times when a debugger should be consulted! There is always a right tool for a given job.

“I have a PR from <feature-branch> into main. Please break it into chunks and dispatch a background agent to review each chunk for <review-criteria>, and then go through the chunks one at a time with me, pausing between each for my feedback”

I love ASCII diagrams! The fact that I can write a diagram that looks equally wonderful in my terminal via cat as it does rendered on my website is incredible.

A good monospaced font and they can look really sharp!

I will definitely give this tool a shot.

I will also shout out monodraw as a really nice little application for building generic ASCII diagrams- https://monodraw.helftone.com/

^Unicode.

Importantly they also render in your source code. I love a good diagram at the top of a file.

Like all other job functions tangential to development- it can be difficult to organize the labor needed to accomplish this within a single team, and it can be difficult to align incentives when the labor is spread across multiple teams.

This gets more and more difficult with modern development practices. Development benefits greatly from fast release cycles and quick iteration- the other job functions do not! QA is certainly included there.

I think that inherent conflict is what is causing developers to increasingly managing their own operations, technical writing, testing, etc.

In my experience, what works best is having QA and a tech writer assigned to a few teams. That way there is an ongoing, close relationship that makes interactions go smoothly.

In a larger org, it may also make sense to have a separate QA group that handles tasks across all teams and focuses on the product as a unified whole.

I can’t imagine any role in software that gets better delivering more work in longer cycles than less work in shorter cycles.

And I can’t speak for technical writing, but developers do operations and testing because automation makes it possible and better than living in a dysfunctional world of fire and forget coding.

Coding agents are excellent at solving merge and rebase conflicts according to natural language instruction.

In my experience (this was about 5 years ago mind you) it was no more complex than an arch installation, but with a smaller community and less documentation.

Thank you for the kind words and feedback! Maybe I could have been more clear on the implementation details.

You were on the money with “UI just a reflection of the folders/files on disk that the AI updates.

There is no real UI integration with the AI, other than the UI embedding the chat interface of a coding agent (using an embedded terminal)

The UI just uses a filesystem watcher to keep track of updates to the relevant directories or files.

Ok cool - yeah that's a very reasonable place to start. I've been toying with ideas for "AI driven UIs" but haven't really experimented with much concrete yet. I feel like there's a lot of space to play here though. Eg. let the AI also create controls that are backed by prompts, etc.

In my experience, people building APIs w/ python are almost always using frameworks, while people building APIs w/ golang are almost always using stdlib

what if I payed a content marketing expert to craft my blog post and title in such a way that drew attention? Would that be paying for

Many discord servers don't even have voice channels and are just collections of text chat channels.