softwaredoug

The team also is not breathlessly talking about how coding is dead. They have pretty sane takes on AI coding including trying to help people who care about code quality.

It’s reported DoD wants to request an extra $200B from Congress to fund Iran https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/world/middleeast/pentagon... …

I’ve seen a lot of subreddits devolve into posting political rage bait articles plastered with ads and very little substance. I hope that doesn’t happen here.

They of course considered it. It’s the civilians at the top that did not.

In my experience there’s a strong “banality of evil” that happens. Some poor schlub ML Eng has shipped a feature that wins an A/B test. They’re pushing to get promoted. Their management wants to …

When you write enough tests to verify AI code, you’re just making the tests the code and compiling an executable from tests https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/03/10/…

If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office. But housing, transportation, daycare costs make that impractical. If they really want me in the office, companies nee…

There is some joy in catching the LLM in a house of cards misunderstanding of how something works. They’ll weave really convincing fictions about from a bit of debugging. Then the Socratic probing of …

The problem is we’re regulating individual behavior by adding to the surveillance apparatus. We should be regulating the companies and dismantling the surveillance that makes the apps addictive to kid…

What if we build UBI but we turn out not to need it? Thats my worry. AI might possibly be “just another technology”. If we put in UBI we may disincentivize labor from adapting to an economic shift. Th…

Are we really just seeing the AI market sort itself out? We have leaders [OpenAI, Anthropic, Google]. Secondary players [xAI, Meta] once looked promising, now sort to the back. We don't need half…

I wouldn't be surprised if there's limited special forces / ground troops to secure Straits of Hormuz. US has sufficiently pissed off gulf allies that securing this reliably may be the…

Most important thing: you need to absolutely feel rock solid working with an AI coding tool (Claude Code, Open Code, Codex). It's the biggest shift in the industry in decades, and has become more…

Crazy thing is if Hormuz stays closed, Tesla could theoretically be positioned to reap massive benefits. But they seem to be moving away from consumer electric cars as their focus.

They literally just went public in Jan. Building it back up was going to take years I don’t understand what kind of shenanigans transpired. But it seems there’s more to in than “bots” If it truly is b…

Every statutory requirement is still being fulfilled. There’s a lot of talk, but we still have a Dept of Education, even if it’s reduced in staffing 50%

The law has stopped this administration on things from offshore wind farms to tariffs. Maybe not fast enough, but it happens routinely. The issue is that SCOTUS decides to use administration to reinte…

Like what?

This fits a consistent trend: Unless Congress explicitly mandates something by law, they should expect an administration to unilaterally dismantle it. Congress delegated authority assuming it’s used i…

What I worry about is the shot in the arm Russian finances are about to get due to oil revenue at a point they seemed to weaken strategically. Not to mention pressure to weaken oil sanctions.

Yeah "evals" might be a better word. Capturing all the stuff that proves your agent team builds the correct thing.

Getting junior / mid-level people to slop cannon PRs at seniors will just burn out seniors. The team might be better having fewer developers using AI more thoughtfully.

I think what we’re getting drawn into is an order of magnitude (or more?) escalation of the regular “strikes on ISIS” phenomenon. Maybe morally on par with Israel leveling Gaza - but in a much larger …

Trump simultaneously says fossil fuels are the future while showing how sensitive oil is to geopolitical shocks.

I mostly worry the US will now need to constantly bomb an unstable region under Israel’s horrifying “mow the grass” philosophy[1]. Both from the fact that’s horrific cost of life in the Middle East an…

The issue is the consumer here doesn’t want to be forced into arbitration. There is legislation proposed to end forced arbitration in consumer contracts like ToS. https://hankjohnson.house.…

Maybe I’m less worried. Teachers seem to have adopted. In my experience educators no longer use AI detectors given the risk of false positives. But some work is obviously lazy AI content. When that ha…