What A Week

In order to seem productive online, or at least prove that I am, I'm taking Simon's advice and posting a bit more about the things I'm working on. It doesn't seem like it'll matter much given how much LLM-driven traffic we've seen Google convert Web search into but here's hoping. Eventually, I'll be a bit more coherent but right now, I'm slowing down my work on Atmosphere projects and focusing on the desktop experience of Livtet; I'm focusing on shipping and making a GTM product so I can support myself.

Links

I'm waffling on this behavior of sharing the links to things I've read that I found interesting. I might populate a collection on semble so it's easier to follow if you're in the Atmosphere. I've included some notes and highlighting from the texts below.

Bundler belongs to the community

A quick history of how https://bundler.io/ came to be from Andre's narrative perspective.

AI Makes Better Software

Reading this actually motivated to take another look at what I'm doing with Livtet because it initially was supposed to just a desktop application but it blew up into this cross-platform monster of sorts thanks to a lot of tab completion with GLM and MiniMax. Namely, it helps:

"when used effectively and responsibly, delivers on the promises of agile development; ship a product, get feedback, iterate."

The Tower Keeps Rising

"The shared language of a software project is the common understanding shared among its developers. This language is rarely written down in one place but it lives in documentation and code. It can also just be something that comes up in code review or watercooler conversations or when one engineer has to explain a change to someone else,"

This, described by Armin, is also why it can take up to six months to fully onboard to a software project. Lore that simplifies the understanding of the code is shared by humans but has been simplified now by LLMs — to a degree. But:

"[i]n the days before agents some of that shared understanding was maintained by friction. If I wanted to change someone’s storage layer, I usually had to read their code and ask them questions. Changing that code might have required coordination with another team whose service depended on it. Some of this friction was useful as it forced communication. It also was a good touchpoint for both of us discover if we still understood how the system worked. I had plenty of experiences in my career where through conversations with my fellow engineer we collectively had to understand again why the system we had worked as it did before we did some changes to it"

— thus reducing the need for direct human-to-human collaboration.

Faulty Towers, vibe sickness, and the vibe bobsled

"If some of the best programmers in the world struggle to find bugs they even know must be there within a 100 line program, there is simply no hope for humans to review the volume of output from LLMs"

That's a very valid concern that Christine makes in their blog post. Software correctness is very hard and a skill that gets one the title of senior staff or principal engineers when done on demand.

Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.

"The system isn't breaking. It's stable, at a level of human cost we've collectively decided to put up with. A maintainer burns out, somebody else picks it up, they burn out, and so on. Serial near-burnout isn't a bug in the equilibrium, it is the equilibrium"

That's a hard truth, but there's a bit of magic in:

"Developers write software the way singers sing, which is to say they'd do it if nobody was listening, and that isn't a problem to be fixed, it's the thing that makes the whole system work;"

— because people do this not for glory (sometimes) but for the hell of it. I'm hoping that this is the path registries end up taking.

Stalling installing

Jeremy writes about his plea (my words) to Apple to stop weakening the abilities to have Web applications become first-class citizens on their devices. I think we're going to need a EU-level-intervening on USB-C level event to get Apple to comply; it seems to be the only thing that works. They can always dance around the standards process by sheer force.

I wish folks in the Apple development community, after paying their $100 tithe were able to see how Apple is holding back the Web in so many ways.