https://blog.waleson.com/2024/04/ai-programming-tools-should-be-added-to.html Skip to main content Search This Blog [ ] [Search] Software etc. Random thoughts on software by Jouke Waleson, a Fractional CTO in NL. I help organizations in part-time to get the most out of their teams, tech and products while building my own software product. AI programming tools should be added to the Joel Test * Get link * Facebook * Twitter * Pinterest * Email * Other Apps First published on Monday, April 22, 2024 Here's a wake-up call to all CTOs: AI programming tools are getting freaking amazing and if you don't allow your teams to use them somehow, it will bite you in the ass in a couple of years. You will be slower and you will lose your best people. The infamous Joel Test is a list from the year 2000 of 12 things all great software companies do. Since then most companies have implemented Git and CI/CD, checking of three items, so we have some space left in the 2024 update ;) I believe "Do you allow your developers to use AI assisted development environments?" is a necessary addition. I get that you don't want your source code to end up on some OpenAI / Microsoft / Github server somewhere, sure, but find a way to use your own models or learn to live with it. Note that this is often not the same as "#9 - Do you use the best tools money can buy?" as blocking AI tools is about data security, not money. So why do I think developers need AI programming tools? I'm a seasoned developer with about 15 years of serious programming experience. In the last 10 years I've done less of it, as I was busy with Product Manager / CTO things. I'm now starting my own company, so I'm programming a lot, and I'm exploring whether some technologies really have a 2-10x impact on my work (supabase does, shout-out to you guys!). I wanted to give AI assistants a try, so I spun up Github Copilot, plandex.ai and aider.chat . There's plenty of things wrong with these tools: they are often wrong, are slow and the GPT4 ones are really expensive. I have many opinions on how AI programming tools should work instead of the brute-force LLMs we use today, but I'll reserve those for another post. Because even in this early phase I can say that I will never go back to not using them. And this is just the start, it will only get better from here. Programming with Copilot is different from normal programming, a bit like singing a duet I guess. You have to adapt to having a partner, give it the right cues, move out of the way when it's their turn etc. But it takes the boring repetitive tasks out of programming, and I love it. I feel less tired, can do better work, and feel like I'm often going 2x faster. So if you're an engineer, find a place that does not block you from using AI tools. Ask it during your interview process! If you're a CTO: find a way to get your engineers to use them, or make one. And if you're Joel Spolsky, please release an update of the Joel Test, would love to know what you think in 2024 ;) Discuss on HN * Get link * Facebook * Twitter * Pinterest * Email * Other Apps Comments Post a Comment Popular posts from this blog The unreasonable effectiveness of i3, or: ten years of a boring desktop environment First published on Sunday, March 03, 2024 Image My wife uses Windows and over the years I've helped her move things to new systems. Win8, 10 and now 11. With every change the UI changes. Now I can't right click the bottom right corner anymore to open Task Manager. The UI feels "fresh" and up-to-date I guess, but does it really matter? My desktop has looked like this since 2008. I love the picture of the gearbox, it's a testament to the hidden precision engineering that goes on inside the built world all the time. I don't see much of the gearbox though, because most of the time my screens look like this: The environment around my background picture has changed a little more, but has been stable for the last 10 years. My experience is very different to my wife's constantly changing system. In 2009 I moved from Windows to Ubuntu, then to Debian using Gnome. Then finally to i3 in 2013 after a brief affair with XMonad in 2012. So by now in early 2024, I've had the same minimal UI for more than 10 years, Read more Idea time: RFID+E-Ink, electronic price tags without batteries First published on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 I got this idea years ago, somewhere in 2004 after I had heard both of RFID and E-Ink. The order is irrelevant ;) The idea is simple, we take: 1) RFID readers, which send radio waves to tags, which pick up some of the energy in the wave, do some computations and send a reply. The tags are brilliant: no batteries, no connected power source of any kind except for the antenna. 2) E-Ink displays, which need power only to change pixels. After the power is cut off, the pixels remain in their current state. The result: a small tag with a display. The display gets initialised and updated by an RFID-reader and after that retains its state indefinitely. Perfect for price tags on shelves in supermarkets, which need to be updated every now and then but are hellish to replace. I soon found out in 2004 that Epson had already done this: http://gizmodo.com/026090/ epsons-electronic-ink-%252B-rfid--21st-century-price-tags Read more Parsing 10TB of Metadata, 26M Domain Names and 1.4M SSL Certs for $10 on AWS First published on Sunday, January 17, 2016 Last May I was working on hobby project similar to this: https:// github.com/zakjan/cert-chain-resolver/ . As I found the cert-chain-resolver project a couple of days later I did nothing with the results, but I got some nice comments on how I used 1 VM to download & process 10TB in a couple of hours on this HN thread recently so I decided to do a write up on the process and publish the data. See the parts below: Part 1: downloading 10TB of metadata in 4 hours Part 2: fetching a ****load of certificates Part 3: playing with the data Total costs My approach was somewhat different from the github project above, instead of using the AIA extension I wanted to brute-force the solution by finding all known intermediate and root certificates in advance. Based on the checksum of the issuer/subject fields I could look up which certificates "claimed" to be the signer of the certificate and then using the signature I could filter out which ones actually were. 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