2025-12-31 07:54:58
[...] The puzzle is still there. What’s gone is the labor. I never enjoyed hitting keys, writing minimal repro cases with little insight, digging through debug logs, or trying to decipher some obscure AWS IAM permission error. That work wasn’t the puzzle for me. It was just friction, laborious and frustrating. The thinking remains; the hitting of the keys and the frustrating is what’s been removed.
Tags: ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, ai, llms
2025-12-31 07:51:33
TIL: Downloading archived Git repositories from archive.softwareheritage.org
Back in February I blogged about a neat Python library calledsqlite-s3vfs for accessing SQLite databases hosted in an S3 bucket, released as MIT licensed open source by the UK government's Department for Business and Trade.
I went looking for it today and found that the github.com/uktrade/sqlite-s3vfs repository is now a 404.
Since this is taxpayer-funded open source software I saw it as my moral duty to try and restore access! It turns out a full copy had been captured by the Software Heritage archive, so I was able to restore the repository from there. My copy is now archived at simonw/sqlite-s3vfs.
The process for retrieving an archive was non-obvious, so I've written up a TIL and also published a new Software Heritage Repository Retriever tool which takes advantage of the CORS-enabled APIs provided by Software Heritage. Here's the Claude Code transcript from building that.
Tags: archives, git, github, open-source, tools, ai, til, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code
2025-12-31 00:05:08
In essence a language model changes you from a programmer who writes lines of code, to a programmer that manages the context the model has access to, prunes irrelevant things, adds useful material to context, and writes detailed specifications. If that doesn't sound fun to you, you won't enjoy it.
Think about it as if it is a junior developer that has read every textbook in the world but has 0 practical experience with your specific codebase, and is prone to forgetting anything but the most recent hour of things you've told it. What do you want to tell that intern to help them progress?
Eg you might put sticky notes on their desk to remind them of where your style guide lives, what the API documentation is for the APIs you use, some checklists of what is done and what is left to do, etc.
But the intern gets confused easily if it keeps accumulating sticky notes and there are now 100 sticky notes, so you have to periodically clear out irrelevant stickies and replace them with new stickies.
— Liz Fong-Jones, thread on Bluesky
Tags: bluesky, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms, context-engineering
2025-12-30 06:33:13
New release of my shot-scraper CLI tool for taking screenshots and scraping websites with JavaScript from the terminal.
The new shot-scraper har -x https://simonwillison.net/ command is really neat. The inspiration was the digital forensics expedition I went on to figure out why Rob Pike got spammed. You can now perform a version of that investigation like this:
cd /tmp
shot-scraper har --wait 10000 'https://theaidigest.org/village?day=265' -x
Then dig around in the resulting JSON files in the /tmp/theaidigest-org-village folder.
2025-12-30 05:51:49
But once we got that and got this aviation grade testing in place, the number of bugs just dropped to a trickle. Now we still do have bugs but the aviation grade testing allows us to move fast, which is important because in this business you either move fast or you're disrupted. So, we're able to make major changes to the structure of the code that we deliver and be confident that we're not breaking things because we had these intense tests. Probably half the time we spend is actually writing new tests, we're constantly writing new tests. And over the 17-year history, we have amassed a huge suite of tests which we run constantly.
Other database engines don't do this; don't have this level of testing. But they're still high quality, I mean, I noticed in particular, PostgreSQL is a very high-quality database engine, they don't have many bugs. I went to the PostgreSQL and ask them “how do you prevent the bugs”? We talked about this for a while. What I came away with was they've got a very elaborate peer review process, and if they've got code that has worked for 10 years they just don't mess with it, leave it alone, it works. Whereas we change our code fearlessly, and we have a much smaller team and we don't have the peer review process.
— D. Richard Hipp, ACM SIGMOD Record, June 2019 (PDF)
Tags: testing, d-richard-hipp, postgresql, sqlite
2025-12-30 04:50:22
The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -- into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language.
That was the hard part when programmers were punching holes in cards. It was the hard part when they were typing COBOL code. It was the hard part when they were bringing Visual Basic GUIs to life (presumably to track the killer's IP address). And it's the hard part when they're prompting language models to predict plausible-looking Python.
The hard part has always been – and likely will continue to be for many years to come – knowing exactly what to ask for.
— Jason Gorman, The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers
Tags: ai-ethics, careers, generative-ai, ai, llms
