More than twenty years ago, my team lead at IBM taught me to play the board game Go. At first I was quite confused, because unlike all the other board games I knew, there was no clear ending condition. The game doesn’t end when the score reaches a certain value, or certain pieces are in particular positions, or all of your pieces are taken. It ends with a strange kind of consensus between opponents when both players agree that the game is done. That happens when each player looks at the board and realises that to make another move would not improve their position, and may even make it worse.

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away…

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I used to think software was like this.

This is a report of some fine-tuning I did, so it’s a bit longer and more technical than my other posts

When I understood how compact the abc notation was for representing music, it immediately set my mind thinking about the possibilities.

What I liked was that in a relatively small amount of text you could represent a whole piece of folk music. Folk music needs to be shared, sometimes in places where there’s no internet, so I built trad.pub which encodes the entirety of the song into a QR code.

A conversation with one of the senior developers about how development changes when it’s heavily AI driven (from memory, so not an exact quote).

C: Working with AI so much on that feature was really…

Me: Intense?

C: Yeah. It’s much more exhausting than development used to be.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

— Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

One of the things I’ve been interested in for a very long time is the question of what it means to be a person. I used to say to people that the reason I was studying computer science is because it was applied philosophy. That’s so much more true now than it was when I said it.

My recent road trip featured a conversation that started like this: “I recently heard a really cool new song, let’s listen to it: Step by Step in Time by Benny Rivers”

So we listened to it, and all agreed that it was indeed pretty cool. I wondered how old Benny Rivers was, since the voice still seemed to have a lot of control which many singers lose as they age.

Did Stalin’s position, then, rest on data of any sort whatever? Of course not. In such cases facts and figures did not interest him. If Stalin said anything, it meant it was so - after all, he was a “genius,” and a genius does not need to count, he only needs to look and can immediately tell how it should be. When he expresses his opinion, everyone has to repeat it and to admire his wisdom… the proposal was not based on an actual assessment of the situation but on the fantastic ideas of a person divorced from reality.

— Kruschev’s Secret Speech

When I discuss the state of AI coding with senior developers, they generally share two different feelings at the same time. Firstly, enthusiasm with what is possible - a little like the ai-mania that I talked about earlier - the excitement about being able to get more of what they want to do done faster, but also sadness that they can see a part of the job they enjoy going away.

I was getting my hair cut last week, when the man cutting my hair turned to his colleague and said “Sean’s getting fired.” “That’s a shame,” said the other barber, “why’s that?”. “He’s just awful, no personality.”

Personality is obviously important for barbers, but how important is it for AI co-workers?

There was an interesting conversation on reddit recently — What is the secret sauce that Claude has and why hasn’t anyone replicated it?

I asked our DevOps lead to set up an environment with one of our AI tools running in a loop, responding to events happening in systems outside, and the ability to suggest code changes of its own in response.

This is not new - I’d been inspired by stories of openclaw, and optio, and I had a fairly clear idea of the specific capabilities I wanted to enable. But after a few hours playing with the concept he realised he couldn’t stop with what I’d talked about.