The whole product team can use coding agents
I did a talk on coding agents, like Claude Code and Codex, advocating that everyone on product teams, not just coders, can use them to do more or better work.
“So then the changes in progress are just there, ready to go.”
“How are they copied? A network sync, an on-disk copy? What about conflict resolution?”
“The data is available on disk and yeah, there’s a sync. Conflicts happen less often than you might think.”
“That’s not how computers work!”
That’s what excitement colliding with worn-in assumptions sounds like.
“So the developer finishes their branch, opens a PR, and then merges it immediately. Once they get feedback, they’ll address it along with whatever they’re working on next. Or a follow-up PR, if they’re working in a different area.”
“But what about foot-guns and project style and crucial but subtle feedback?”
“Yeah, sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot. But most people only do it a few times before they start to work through it. The upside of getting code into production within minutes instead of hours or days is worth it.”
“You release un-reviewed code within hours of writing it? Multiple times per day? That can’t possibly work!”
Whenever you hear about another team doing something strange that you can’t even process at first, you’re glimpsing a team’s culture peaking through the white space. The more unfathomable or shocking, the deeper the assumption you’re pulling on. Team culture is repetition, that which is done without even thinking about it.
Assumptions seem like an immovable object, until they’re not.
When you hear about practices that rely on none of those habits and assumptions, it brings the whole thing into question. Of course, your initial emotional reactions are “that can’t possibly work” and “why would you even want to do that?”.
Right after “that can’t even” is probably a pretty big insight. If you’re up for it.
Every so often I find myself a few screens deep in an application’s navigation hierarchy and forget I can just pop out instead of going back to the top. I was reading feeds, decided I should do something else, but felt compelled to go back from the item view to the item list to the feed list to the very top of the hierarchy. Silly! I can simply stop reading feeds.
The same thing happens in writing apps: I’m working on a piece and feel like I need to “leave” the app at the very top, seeing all my well-intended but not0-quite-perfect attempts to organize and corral my writing.
I can quit an application from anywhere, not just the top screen!
Algorithmic feeds don’t exhibit this habit, despite presenting very little hierarchy, are worse for this. They actively try to keep comments, liking, sharing, etc. all in one endless view. There’s no “bouncing to the top”, just continual scrolling. Oof.
My habit is probably related to trying to keep as close to zero tabs open at any given time. Which is a great habit!
If we’re pairing or screen sharing, and you reveal a browser window with hundreds of open tabs, rest assured I’m keeping quiet on the outside but encouraging you to close several dozen of those tabs on the inside.
I’m on-board with exploring LLM and agent tooling to improve upon the whole endeavor of software development. But, I consistently find myself disabling Copilot/Claude/etc. completion and next edit prediction in Markdown files. This is the one way in which I’m “too cool” for the machines, the only area where I feel like I certainly know better than the little robot on my shoulder whispering probable next phrases in my ear.
I don’t want any help from the little slot machine of floating-point numbers embedded in my editor. Don’t tell me what I might wanna do or what I could do when it comes to writing, robot! 👴
Writing words, in a text editor, feels like the most creative and think-y activity of the coding regimen. It is a unique situation where I am doing actual invention, creating wholesale of a new cloth, building up from tabla rasa.
Which isn’t to imply that models and agents aren’t helpful for writing, generating ideas, and doing wholesale invention. I love starting with “bad ideas only” and models are superb at that! 😉
When sizing up a stranger, the advice I’ve heard in the past was to observe how they treat service staff: waitstaff, flight attendendants, concierge, etc. This one seems equally appropriate to the internet age:
To rapidly reveal the true character of a person you just met observe them stuck on an abysmally slow internet connection.
— Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living
If this ain’t a useful frame of reference for our time, I don’t know what is:
Regard for power implies disregard for those without power as is demonstrated by what happened after Moses shifted the route of the Northern State Parkway away from Otto Kahn’s golf course. The map of the Northern State Parkway in Cold Spring Harbor is a map not only of a road but of power—and of what happens to those who, unwittingly, are caught in the path of power.
— Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker
The self-taught amateurs can be weird, or make unorthodox moves that the formally trained can’t see:
“I don’t think it’s very nice,” Angela complained. “I think it’s ugly, but I don’t know anything about modern art. Sometimes I wish Newt would take some lessons, so he could know for sure if he was doing something or not.” “Self-taught, are you?” Julian Castle asked Newt. “Isn’t everybody?” Newt inquired. “Very good answer.” Castle was respectful.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Case in point: as I was using the revision mode in Ulysses to check this post, nine problems were identified. One misspelling, three incorrect hyphens (another sign o’ the times), and the rest were quibbles about syntax used in the quotes.
Let the experts cook, as it’s said of late.
A little voice in the recesses of my brain, the one that remembers of compiling Linux kernels and collecting WinAmp themes on university Ethernet LANs in the 1990s, is very happy to report that “obscure bit of syntax dot TLD” is still a very valid and fashionable sort of domain name for your programming blog.
Everyone is losing the thread. Maybe that’s what makes this moment in history so difficult to follow and frustrating to live in. Not just politics, and media, and our government(s).
- BMW lost the thread on their sports cars and classic design language.
- Apple lost the thread on great UI.
- JJ Abrams lost the thread on how to (finish) a Star Wars trilogy.
Maybe, somehow, Saturday Night Live only briefly lost the thread because the thread was, almost from the beginning, “did we ever have the thread?”
Maybe we should build more personal software in the text:
For navigation, the Cat featured leap keys: two rose-colored keys below the spacebar. You could press and hold one while typing a sequence of characters to “teleport” to the nearest instance of that pattern. The left leap key would take you back, the right leap key would take you forward.
User conventions emerged to support life within this system. Users would implement their own navigational systems using special characters, tags, “@keywords”, and consistent date and timestamp formats that would work well with the leap keys.
— Alexander Obenauer, Recreating the Canon Cat Document Interface
At the least, we’re probably over-indexed on scripts gluing files together, spreadsheets, and ideologies that expand into multi-hour courses.