Fortunate to be reminded of this right now, especially the pull-quote about conceptual integrity

This is a good way of putting it. I ship individual features faster, but the end to end process of shipping software has remained the roughly same because the vast majority of my time is building the “theory”.

> Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for, that will eventually collapse under its own weight. Uh-huh. Listen, here's what you're gonna do: log off, log back in and then post the opposite of everything you just said, ok?

We've found pyrite thinking it gold. Then we bought the whole saloon drinks and hookers. The hangover tomorrow morning will not be pleasant. And the bar tab even less so.

I love that Naur paper! Also love this essay that extends it: https://hiringengineersbook.com/post/autonomy/ I literally maintain a conceptual-model.md that describes the “things” in our entire system, how they relate to each other, and some bits about how that maps to the code (the DB schema maps sort of closely to it but sometimes not that close, and so does the API, and that’s ok). I wrote most of the doc myself, but plan to coauthor with LLMs going forward. So far it’s saved me tons of typing as I add features. I don’t have enough data yet on how well it will guide myself and others when adding stuff that really stretches the model, but I’m also optimistic that it’s a valuable approach.

> Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for Well put! Now that we have a magic tool that can generate tokens on demand, the quality of the underlying idea gains enormous importance relative to the code. Tokens are cheap. Good ideas are not. I would like to hope that some people take advantage of this newfound agentic power to create better theories. But there's a sizable population that seems intent on generating more and more code, regardless of quality.

Imo the main benefit of AI is allowing faster experimentation and more parallelism, as well as faster iteration.