Abishr
@abishr12
https://abishr12.substack.com/
Every dev using AI should read this
I was one of the 16 devs in this study. I wanted to speak on my opinions about the causes and mitigation strategies for dev slowdown. I'll say as a "why listen to you?" hook that I experienced a -38% AI-speedup on my assigned issues. I think transparency helps the community.
Winning customers is all in the details. When you delight them, they'll keep coming back. I have no doubt someone in the company thought this feature wasn't worthwhile.
Revolut's website is the first EVER for a bank where the site "remembers" where I was when it auto logs me out after inactivity. Logging in I'm back where I was! All other banks log you out, redirect to the login page and lose state. Hundreds of small things like this add up!!
Remember when in the late 90s / early 2000s someone came up with a way to hire 10 developers for the same price as your current devs. Same competence level. Same output per dev. It should have led to 10x the output. It was called “offshoring.” It’s NOT what happened…
This episode cuts through all the AI hype to get to the core value - doing BETTER things FASTER. Simply going faster or doing more is not just neutral, it's a negative.
When devs use AI tools, they save the most time with: A) Code generation B) Something else Surprisingly, based on the research DX did with 180 companies, it's not code generation! Stack trace analysis and refactoring both save more time (!!) @rhein_wein gives details:
What, if anything, can one learn or conclude from this observation? (you can assume that the diagram is indeed true for a majority of people)
How much you learn:
11 Takeaways from my interview with Daniel Kahneman: 1. Delay Your Intuition: At 22, Kahneman redesigned the Israeli army’s interview system. The old way relied on gut feelings about recruits, and it failed badly. His fix: make interviewers score six specific traits separately,…
How can I be of value vs how can I be of service
In my early 30s, as I was hitting a wall, I started asking myself questions like "Why am I working so hard?" "What's it all for?" "Am I climbing the wrong hill?" Now, with more wisdom, I ask questions like "How can I help?" "What's the valuation?" "Who else is investing?"
The biggest mistake people make in life (and investing) is they think an equation is additive (A + B + C) instead of multiplicative (A x B x C) In an additive equation if a variable goes to 0 you’re OK. In a multiplicative equation if an input equals zero you blow up
AI is best thought of as a sculptor not a builder
"I use AI in a separate window. I don't enjoy Cursor or Windsurf, I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers." @dhh, the legendary programmer and creator of Ruby on Rails has the most beautiful and philosophical idea about what AI takes away from programmers.
Ignore the misleading screenshot. One of the best takes on focus I have seen.
Steve Jobs Was Not a Nice Person.
How many times do people need to discover this? @drmikeisraetel please help
Yes, doing your cardio fasted burns more body fat. But, if you offset the calories burned, you’ll end up in exactly the same place as somebody who eats before cardio. Put simply, calories in versus calories out matters more than whether you train fasted (w/respect to BF loss).
First-mover advantage doesn't mean you can't catch up on product. It means you can't catch up on distribution despite delivering an equally good or better product.
First-mover advantage is a myth
A more nuanced view - start at a mid-size/large company to have room to fail and learn from those with a wealth of experience. Take that with you to the smaller company.
I am often asked, especially by the young-ish folks, if it's wiser to work for a small organization or a big enterprise. Of course, my go-to answer is "it depends, buddy", but let me offer something more here... In a small firm, you sit three metres away from the founder and…
IMO willpower is an incoherent concept invented by smug people who think they have it in order to denigrate people who they think don't. It doesn't map onto any real truth about motivation that I know of — and as a result, saps agency and erodes our imagination. (More below.)
I earnestly believe there is no such thing as willpower, it is a collective delusion that recasts differences in how hard something is for different people as a kind of moral virtue
Having a pleasant personality is an enormously low bar to clear but it's one of the best things you can ever do professionally. Too often in SV people believe believe being obnoxious to be an indicator of skill. Might be true, rarely correct.
There was this engineer on my team a while back who was: a good dev, but not the best dev. Got everything done. But had zero ego, a very nice personality, and got along with *everyone* on the team very well. When he joined, the team became... better. Nicer. More balanced.