As software engineers, I get the feeling we’re moving almost entirely away from code. And I don’t just mean having conversations with agents where they write all the code. But even further, maintaining just a system of prompts that describes the software. Treating the agents as some kind of modern compiler that compiles English into code. The natural language becomes the “code base”. When we hold these imperative conversations with agents, tell them what we want, watch them write code, we review it, and then close out the session, starting all over from scratch next time. We lose so much each time. ...

Coding and Legislature I’ve never understood why we don’t employ standard software engineering practices when creating laws. Comments, Documentation, Readable Code Version Control Boilerplate and DRY Refactoring Modularity Code Reviews Beta Testing Use Cases, Case Scenarios, Feature Testing User Experience and Interface Design Documentation Clearly, written laws not meant to be understood by laymen. That’s okay though, we have compilers that translate our English code into binary form. Now I’m not saying write laws as a form of code, or even pseudo code. Thats a bit extreme. But readable code is considered to be goal, not a detriment. When we can’t write legible code, we add comments to explain the purpose of the line or stanza. We’ll even document the code and its entire processes externally elsewhere, to help others follow along with our intentions. ...

Disillusionment as a Service Listening to a friend talk a little bit about her own trouble getting involved in charity work and social change organizations, reminded me of how hard it was for me to get into the regular practice of “Giving”. The biggest thing I fought against was the simple idea that my little bit couldn’t possibly make a difference. And that going out there and helping was just to make me feel better, in a conceited sort of way. I had to get past that, and see that every bit does count. ...

The Search for Spock I’m always looking for better ways to organizing my life and improving my personal productivity. One tool that has popped up in several discussion is Trello. I know a few people using it as a flexible online board for managing their workload, both professionally and personally. It seems like a great idea to work this into my own arsenal and see if its the godsend all the hype leads me to believe. ...

Note: be warned, rant ahead. The Incident My homepage is now yahoo. A site I never use, never have used, never will use. My default search is now Yahoo. Again, a service I will never use. (even more so now) An ugly and useless yahoo search widget is added to my toolbar. It takes up precious real-estate. Worse, these changes seem to be permanent. Or at least damn close to it. After various fiddling and config settings, most of this remains. I’m unable to correct the hacking that was done to my computer. ...

For Whom The Bell Tolls. As previously mentioned, I use VIM rather heavily, and I have some OCD behaviors when doing so, which includes hitting <escape> a lot. So I like to turn off the bell sounds vi makes on errors and unnecessary commands. IdeaVim I’m also a heavy user of IdeaVim plugin for IntelliJ. I wouldn’t be able to use IDEs at all without those plugins that add VI operation modes to the built-in editors. ...

I’ve been using Evernote for taking notes for a while now. But I really miss taking notes in VIM. History I’m a heavy VIM user. I use it for coding, through and though. So much so, that I use VIM-style editor wrapper plugins IDEs such as Eclipse and IntelliJ. Otherwise I find normal ’editors’ clunky and un-usable. When it comes to coding I’m clearly more productive, and happy in a VI like environment, with command modes, regular expressions, and no need for a mouse or arrow keys. It only made sense that I’d use VIM for taking notes and tracking my work. ...