Sunil Pai's “senior engineer death spiral” describes what happens when engineers start managing perception instead of reporting reality. The deeper problem may not be individual pride or fear, but organizations that make uncomfortable information too expensive.
Kenta Cho built a Z80 REPL: type an instruction, execute it immediately, and watch the machine state change. It's eight years old, still delightful, and a neat example of what happens when good tooling makes experimentation cheap.
ByteCode.News has been quiet for a month. Part of that is ordinary life, but part is something more familiar: the point where everything happening in technology starts to look the same. Here’s what happened, and what BCN is changing to get moving again.
A release to Maven Central used to cost more than the code being released. Jason Lee's JReleaser walkthrough shows what replaced that process: one Maven profile, one command.
A recent discussion on how AI was used effectively made me wonder what "effective" or "better" meant, because there's no way to test the alternative any more to compare. I still don't know how to characterize my own results, but I think it makes me better because it gives me a chance to work out who I am and what I mean to say, but not really how to say it.
Andrew Oram asked why programming languages rise and fall, and quoted the answer without noticing. Programming is a vocation, an art, and a job. Make any of those harder than they need to be, and your language survives exactly as long as it can't be replaced.
Sean Goedecke argues that domain expertise is the real prompting skill. He's describing two quantities as one: a floor, available to anyone who can describe what acceptance looks like, and a gain that multiplies whatever you bring.
Xberg 1.0 has been released. Xberg is a document extraction engine, describing itself as a "document intelligence framework." It's written in Rust, with fifteen generated language bindings, and a very descriptive data model that provides a *lot* of flexibility.
There's no standard for marking AI contribution, and there can't be, because contribution isn't a scalar. What readers actually want is attestation, and that's what a byline always was. The question was never whether a machine touched the text. It's whether anyone was behind the controls.