In essence a language model changes you from a programmer who writes lines of code, to a programmer that manages the context the model has access to, prunes irrelevant things, adds useful material to context, and writes detailed specifications. If that doesn't sound fun to you, you won't enjoy it.

Think about it as if it is a junior developer that has read every textbook in the world but has 0 practical experience with your specific codebase, and is prone to forgetting anything but the most recent hour of things you've told it. What do you want to tell that intern to help them progress?

Eg you might put sticky notes on their desk to remind them of where your style guide lives, what the API documentation is for the APIs you use, some checklists of what is done and what is left to do, etc.

But the intern gets confused easily if it keeps accumulating sticky notes and there are now 100 sticky notes, so you have to periodically clear out irrelevant stickies and replace them with new stickies.

— Liz Fong-Jones, thread on Bluesky

Tags: bluesky, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms, context-engineering

Almost two months ago, a tape containing UNIX v4 was found. It was sent off to the Computer History Museum where bitsavers.org would handle the further handling of the tape, and this process has now completed. You can download the contents of the tape from Archive.org – which is sadly down at the moment – while squoze.net has a readme with instructions on how to actually run the copy of UNIX v4 recovered from the tape.

x-ray delta one posted a photo:

Managers often talk about performance as a static thing. We say that someone is a “high performer” or “low performer”, as if performance is a fixed attribute of their personality. This fixed mindset is a mistake. Performance is contextual: how well you perform your job is deeply dependent on the conditions around you.

(Thank you Tim)

Google's John Mueller was asked if it makes sense to publish 8,000 new pages at once or slowly publish them over time. Like, would publishing them all at once cause some of SEO issue with Google Search.