Adam Keys is Thinking

Another month, another Cars and Coffee event. Honestly, 75% of it was Porsche 911s of all vintages. But, I tried to work cars with other names or numbers in there too.

Experience the Rennbow.

Lovely, nostalgia. A friend’s dad had one of these leviathans back in the day.

As adventure Porsches go, this one is delightfully fitted and unique.

Porsche police cars, they were a thing.

I will always abide a Talladega Nights reference.

Porsche Heritage examples are not cheap, but they are tasteful.

Anyone miss running Linux in the 1990s/2000s and leaving a visualizer, xscreensaver, or some kind of demo running while working on other things? Nostalgia is a heck of a thing. 😆 Improbably, Apple Music still has something close to Winamp/XMMS visualizations.

On one hand, there’s the classical music catalog mode of blogging. This is a bookmark, that’s a note, a photo here, a link there, an essay when I’m feeling ambitious. Étude, sonata, variations on a theme. Framing the writing by its scale and shape. A taxonomist’s delight.

Then there’s the Jack White sort of blogging: here’s a thing, I made it. The edges weren’t worked down too much, the roughness is still there. It preserves the energy and spirit of the idea more than it tries to explore the idea to its logical end. Better to cut ideas too soon than coddle them.

Both work! Blogging is a big, weird tent.

I miss writing “DO NOT ERASE” on whiteboards when a collaborator and I finally succeed at capturing the mental or visual model of a problem or its solution.

It’s like writing “a good thing happened here today” on the whiteboard.

Close second place: the act of crossing an item off your to-do list, particularly one on paper.

What’s a high-level language? Is it Java, Go, and C#? Or is it Ruby, JavaScript, or Python? Where does Swift go?

It’s all a matter of perspective. To a kernel developer who thinks about bytes on a wire or spinning a disk to read a file, git is incredibly high-level. 🙃 To a Smalltalk developer, files on disk are low-level (I assume).

Anyone telling you otherwise, including past or future Adams, is making a no true Scotsman argument.

📺Currently watching:

• The second (and final) season of Andor was spectacular. The best Star War of the past ten years, IMO.
• S3 and S4 of Slow Horses continue to delight. Capable but slovenly Gary Oldman is a great character.
• I’m surprised how much I look forward to The Studio every week. Highly recommended, even if Seth Rogen isn’t your thing.
• S4 of Hacks plays up tension between the leads more than I’d like. Otherwise, the writing and performances are excellent.
• Reserving judgement on S1 of Murderbot. The first episode did not grab me, but the second was an improvement.
• Upcoming: Not sure how I feel about The Bear. But, my feelings won’t change how award shows go, so maybe I should just go with it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

The web (and blogs) are free to be weird! Experiment on structure. Don’t feel constrained or normalized by the forces of engagement, algorithms, or profitability. Do your own thing.

A personal website brings flexibility for presentation. Today, you may create a chronological blog; tomorrow, you can revamp the whole website and turn it into a carefully curated knowledge garden. Today, you can design a static website (like this one); tomorrow, you can evolve it to an interactive experience.

– Candost Dagdeviren, On Owning a Website

In other words: you can just do stuff. It’s great.

1990s “alt” culture was wild. You could throw an obscure t-shirt on, watch a lesser-known or (future) cult-classic movie, and that was a whole starter personality.

“Oh yeah, I’ve met that guy Adam with the Citizen Dick shirt who really likes My Blue Heaven and Army of Darkness.” 🙃🤦🏻‍♂️

Whilst editing yet another newsletter on building with AI and Claude gave me this feedback:

Consider replacing “slopping out code” with a more specific term like “generating excessive code”

Apparently, Monsieur Model does not like how I refer to its art! That’s a little sensitive for a billion floating-point numbers masquerading as a French man in a trench coat. 😛

…having an LLM chat running in a terminal session (optionally accepting pastes from another LLM or watching for instructions from special comments in your source tree) is a major shift in how we relate to writing code. … Working this way, it’s easy to get down a rabbit hole of machine-generated code and lose track of either the system changes or the feature you’re trying to build up. There’s plenty of room for UX improvement. But, it’s an intriguing preview of how we might build software in the future.

— What would you do if I coded with Claude?

Regardless of how sensitive or sycophantic models may be, there are practical options, whether you find these things charming or off-putting, to learn how to work (“collaborate”) with models.

Ed. All Beatles/Joe Cocker references in this newsletter and blog are hand-crafted with genuine human intelligence. We take pride in our musical allusions and would never consider outsourcing them to other humans or human-like statistical models. That is our quality promise to you, the reader!

Of all the hype I’ve read about AI, none of it has suggested that they will make estimating software projects a thing of the past. If they aren’t going to eat software estimates, I guess we’re going to have to strap in.

The good news is:

1. Delivering software reduces the demand for estimates. The faster you can deliver software, the less you will need estimates.
2. Estimating software as a list of tasks scored by effort and variance conveys the most important information required for good-faith use of estimates.
3. Planning out a project by developing an estimate, rather than just hacking it out, is a way of developing software and enough of a creative effort that you might enjoy it more than sitting in meetings and updating budget spreadsheets.

— Make peace with estimates and get good at system design along the way

I finished this newsletter and asked myself, “Do I like estimates now?” I may not like them deeply in my bones, but I definitely changed my mind about them! In particular, looking at estimates as part of the creative process of designing, building, and delivering software is a useful perspective shift.

Back to the implied hype-question, “Will LLMs eat software estimation?”, I think the answer is no. Language models can’t really generate new ideas or information. Even when vibe coding, language models are reassembling existing ideas (e.g., their training data) in somewhat novel ways. They don’t generate new information, particularly in the Claude Shannon sense of the term.

Even if LLMs could generate novel information, estimates are painful when they create schedule risk (i.e., hard deadlines) rather than discover uncertainties and hedge against surprises. Language models can’t slop their way out of social, human problems.

I’ve noticed an uptick in writing about human thought processes using the language of machine learning and neural networks. Jargon-y phrases like “improve your mental search space” or “if at first you don’t succeed, improve your gradient descent”. (I only made up one of these sentences!)

Normally, I’m all about this kind of metaphorical bridge from one domain to another. But in a lot of these cases, I feel like more direct language would benefit both the discourse on language models and using them to approximate human intelligence.

The people who make LLMs have little discernible interest in cognition itself. Some of them may believe that they’re interested in cognition, but what they’re really focused on is product — that is, output, what gets spat out in words or images or sounds at the conclusion of an episode of thinking.

— the irrelevance of thinking – The Homebound Symphony

While it’s spectacular that science has found success in modeling human intelligence with matrix multiplication, I think the humans engaged in science would benefit by avoidance of reducing human thought (intelligence, emotion, art, the whole gamut) down to GPU-friendly arithmetic.

A lot of critics think I’m stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

— Kurt Vonnegut

Thorsten Ball’s tutorial on building agents only takes an hour or two to work through. It’s an excellent read for audiences of all technical acumen.

It’s not that hard to build a fully functioning, code-editing agent.

It seems like it would be. When you look at an agent editing files, running commands, wriggling itself out of errors, retrying different strategies — it seems like there has to be a secret behind it.

There isn’t. It’s an LLM, a loop, and enough tokens.

— How to Build an Agent

After you’ve dabbled a bit with vibe coding tools, there’s no better way to wrap your head around vibe coding than to build it for yourself. There’s no magic, even if you don’t know Go!

If you’re handy with Ruby, you can easily compress the ideas therein down to about a hundred lines of code.

	  class ReadFile < RubyLLM::Tool
	    description <<~DESC
	      Read the contents of a given relative file path. Use this when you want to see what's inside a file. Do not use this with directory names.
	    DESC
	    param :path,
	          type: :string,
	          required: true,
	          desc: 'The relative path of a file in the working directory.'
	
	    def execute(path:)
	      File.read(path)
	    rescue StandardError => e
	      { error: e.message }
	    end
	  end

RubyLLM is a fantastic library. Nearly all the ideas in the tutorial are concise abstractions. Recommended.

If a team identifies a process, feature, or subsystem as “slow”, it risks resisting change by mythology alone.

Slowness seems to make a special contribution to this picture in our heads. Time is especially valuable. So as we learn that a task is slow, an especial cost accrues to it. Whenever we think of doing the task again, we see how expensive it is, and bail.

– James Somers, Speed Matters: Why Working Quickly Is More Important Than It Seems

Today’s “this took longer than I’d hoped” can become tomorrow’s “here be dragons” or “we need to do days and weeks of planning and estimating before we start in this part of the system”.

I’ve found cross-organizational conversations prevent ‘slowness mythologies’ from forming. Retrospectives and 1:1s let team members identify friction points. From there, I gather holistic feedback and pitch solutions to the team.

Engineering leadership is fundamentally social!

For circa 2015 Adam, two of the most stressful words in software development were deadlines and estimates. To my surprise, deadlines were easier to write about.

Deadlines prevent work from snowballing. They guide us to favor the clarity of the present over the speculative grandeur of the future.

— More of a strongly worded date, if I’m being honest

I didn’t have a way to work it to the essay above, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one of the greatest deadline hacks of the past half-century:

The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s eleven-thirty.

— Lorne Michaels

Saturday Night Live, what fantastic hack! 😉 If you’re playing along at home, SNL is actually two deadline hacks:

• There’s a Big Consequences deadline at 11:30pm on Saturday; the show goes on whether a prop, sketch, or actor is ready or not.
• Every live show week has a long-established cadence: pitching the host on Monday, writing through the night on Tuesday, table read on Wednesday, rehearsals and iteration Thursday and Friday, dress rehearsal on Saturday, final changes, and then the live show.

I should worry less about missing One Amazing Thing, the feed FOMO. I can’t read the whole internet. Not even the small part I’ve carefully selected and loaded into my feed reader.

Newsblur has an option to expire feed items after some number of days. I’d previously disabled this, erroneously thinking I could at least read the part of the internet I have manually identified as interesting.

So, with some hesitation, I turned on expiring items, taking me from several thousand unread items to several hundred. This is a nice, but superficial, step forward. As a result, I’m reading feeds more frequently because there’s a less-scary top-line number. (Even when I had the number hidden, it was still scary.)

The good stuff, even if automatically expired, will probably find its way back to me. I’m likely to return to writers I enjoy and look through the archives anyway. Instead of feed FOMO, I should worry more about reading the bigger, guaranteed good things. There are books, essays, longer articles out there. Not to mention making my own stuff. Do more of that!

I wonder what other kinds of data would be improved with an expiration date. Not that all data should disappear. Backlog/task-shaped data seems the most likely to benefit from automatically deleting themselves. Unread emails, tasks, project work, read-it-later links, watch-list videos, that one season you never got around to watching on a streaming service you’re still paying for. If those archived themselves, or I archived them every few months, maybe that would make for checking off more of the good stuff!

Portland Cars and Coffee. Even on Mustang day, the European and Japanese cars were good.

Not pictured: the most tastefully modified Toyota GR86 I’ve ever seen. 👌🏻

📺 Currently watching:

• Paradise (S1): James Marsden and Sterling K. Brown make an excellent cast. The show itself is an okay puzzle box/mystery story. Interestingly, not the deepest or best at building a mysterious world, so they may be able to land the second season without falling off.
• Drive to Survive (S7): this season was gifted with equal parts on-track competition and behind-the-scenes backstabbing. The 2024 season was surprisingly competitive. Nearly half of the drivers were seeking new seats. This makes for good television! (Reminder: this is a “Real Housewives” style show, not a sports documentary.🤣)
• Severance (S2): they still got it. Splendid cast, writing, production.
• White Lotus (S3): they also still got it. Another great cast of actors you know, some actors you don’t. Great scenery! Reminder: if you ever see show-creator Mike White on your vacation, probably move away so you don’t end up a character on the next season.
• Andor (S1): rewatching this anticipating Season 2. Definitely the best Star Wars of the Disney+ era, even though it’s not strictly the most entertaining one.
• Slow Horses (S1 & S2): Gary Oldman as the leader of a band of misfits, outcast MI-5 spies? It works.

Shows returning later this year that I’m looking forward to: Poker Face S2, Andor S2, Hacks S4.

As goes writing, so goes software development teams:

“Having a method, a process, makes my writing more consistently good. This might sound like a win, but it is a problem. The usefulness and beauty of essays follow a power law, where the outliers create almost all the value—so if I make my essays more consistent, I remove not only the mistakes but also much of the upside. A method can, if used wisely, be a tool that helps you see possibilities. It can’t replace paying close attention to the material and figuring out what it is asking of you.”

— Henrik Karlsson, How I Write Essays

Growing teams are often nostalgic for the times when they were smaller. Maybe it’s not Founder Mode or yearning for a time when there was more low-hanging fruit. Perhaps they’re remember a time when they could swing for the fences more often at the expense of striking out more often? That is, processes designed for predictability and throughput weren’t constraining the magnitude of their big wins or their focus on all the details that make something excellent.

James Edward Gray II, Scrappy Parsing:

The good news is that Elixir is the best language I have ever worked with for doing serious parsing. Let’s prove it. Let’s pull the data out of a SQLite database file using vanilla Elixir and some tricks from my Scrappy Programmer Livebook series.

Reader: he proves it. I enjoyed the heck out of reading this. James has still got it. (One should never doubt that he might lose it!)

James’ code reminded me of the many ways Elixir is really lovely. I’ve annotated his code with my own reflections on what makes Elixir great. All the code is James’ work; the comments are my, well, commentary and opinions.

  # First off, Elixir is lovely and I'm a little sad I've 
  # never had the opportunity to work with it on a daily 
  # basis.
  parse_page = fn bytes, i ->
    start = if i == 1, do: 100, else: 0

    # Reading binary data via pattern matching is one of the
    # the best things about Erlang, so it's also a great thing 
    # about Elixir.
    <<raw_type::1*8,
      _first_page_freeblock::2*8,
      cell_count::2*8,
      _raw_cell_content_start::2*8,
      _fragmented_free_bytes::1*8,
      rest::binary>> = binary_slice(bytes, start, 12)

    # "Plain old pattern matching", also lovely
    type =
      case raw_type do
        2 -> :interior_index
        5 -> :interior_table
        10 -> :leaf_index
        13 -> :leaf_table
      end

    right_most_pointer =
      if type in [:interior_index, :interior_table] do
        <<right_most_pointer::4*8>> = rest
        right_most_pointer
      else
        nil
      end

    %{
      index: i,
      start: start,
      type: type,
      cell_count: cell_count,
      right_most_pointer: right_most_pointer
    }
  end

  # Here we have a function defined for a very specific pattern match, including structural _and_ guard conditions. How many conditionals does this save in function bodies? I don't know how often this helps daily Elixir users, but I sure do love reading it.
  read_page = fn %{page_count: last_page} = db, i when i > 0 and i <= last_page ->
    :file.position(db.file, (i - 1) * db.page_size)

    # Despite many attempts, Elixir's syntax design for function 
    # pipelines will probably always eclipse the same design in JavaScript or Ruby.
    # Spoiler: it's because Elixir doesn't have to rearrange `self` and the threaded parameter. 🤷🏻‍♂️
    db.file
    |> IO.binread(db.page_size)
    |> parse_page.(i)
  end

  # I've tripped all over myself praising Elixir here, but I'd
  # like to point out that Elixir has the same ungainly syntax
  # for calling anonymous functions that Ruby does. 😆
  open_db.(db_path, fn db ->
    Enum.map(1..3//1, fn i ->
      read_page.(db, i)
    end)
  end)

(This is not recruiter bait, but I’m listening, if you’re out there. 😉)