jtbetz22

4 ms·

1.
by jtbetz22 27d ago
I periodically go through the big box of cables and pull out anything that I don't expect to ever need again. I put those in another box, seal it completely, and write a message on the outside along the lines of "presumed useless
2.
by jtbetz22 5mo ago
I'm continuing to focus on ways to set strong code quality guardrails in an era where most code is not handwritten. The result is http://getcaliper.dev . It has a number of mechanisms that help substantially: 1. It can extra
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by jtbetz22 5mo ago
According to Bloomberg[1] construction of the first phase of the second avenue subway cost about 2.5B USD per mile. At that rate, even if you just look at extending the A/C/E from Jamaica to JFK, you're talking about 15B or
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by jtbetz22 6mo ago
I believe that AI-powered software development means we need to fundamentally rethink how we preserve code quality. Model output volumes mean that code review only as a final check before merge is way too late, and far too burdensome. Using
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by jtbetz22 6mo ago
Oh this is really useful. There's definitely a problem to be solved here. agent guidance files, like all forms of documentation, can quickly grow stale. I've tried to tackle a similar problem with a couple different approaches. On
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by jtbetz22 6mo ago
> So even when you have a nicely structured commit history, you end up realizing that some things need to be changed and start appending a bunch of "fix" and "actual fix" commits at the end. I have found that this no
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by jtbetz22 6mo ago
Maintaining (and, ideally, improving!) code quality is, IMO, the biggest open problem in agentic development. I've been coming at this from a slightly different angle, building a system that encodes checks that run against code authore
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by jtbetz22 6mo ago
This is really cool. In general I think there has been (a) too little utilization of the hooks provided by agents for deterministic checks and follow-ups to agentic coding, and (b) too little investment in creating re-usable org-wide monito
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by jtbetz22 6mo ago
I find it is now 1000x more effective to draft documents in collaboration with Claude, working with a markdown file as the output format. However, git doesn't work in my team as a document collaboration mechanism - the commenting and d
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by jtbetz22 7mo ago
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415402
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by jtbetz22 7mo ago
Interesting. I don't know if people are trusting AI-generated code too much, but AI is generating way more code than humans can review, and the 'looks fine' bar is what the AI gets held to. I strongly agree with you that the
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by jtbetz22 7mo ago
At my company, we ask everyone in the hiring process about how they have used any kind of agentic coding tools. We're not concerned about hiring for the 'skill' of using these things, but more as a culture check - we are a ve
13.
by jtbetz22 7mo ago
I have been ~obsessed~ with exactly this problem lately. We built AI code generation tools, and suddenly the bottleneck became code review. People built AI code reviewers, but none of the ones I've tried are all that useful - usually,
14.
by jtbetz22 7mo ago
This is a real problem. Hopsule looks interesting. IIUC, the core of your approach is that decisions get locked as immutable constraints and then served to agents via MCP when they query for context — is that right? Is there anything you ca
15.
by jtbetz22 7mo ago
The architectural drift problem you're describing is exactly what I see with AI-assisted development — agents move fast but conventions slip. I built Caliper to catch that at the hook level: it reads your CLAUDE.md (or existing .cursor
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by jtbetz22 7mo ago
Yeah, this is a common problem, I have been thinking about it a fair bit. I ran into a related problem at scale though: deterministic linters catch syntax and obvious anti-patterns, but they miss the harder stuff. Logic bugs that pass all t
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by jtbetz22 7mo ago
I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schools. Two points of anecdata from that experience: -
18.
by jtbetz22 7mo ago
Agentic code construction has broken traditional models for code review - the volume is just too high for humans to keep up with. There are some good tools out there for automating pr review; IMO, they don't catch enough, and they cat
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by jtbetz22 10mo ago
I am old enough to remember when it was 15-199, taught by Steven Rudich, titled "How to think like a computer scientist". They had to run it for a few years before they realized CS kids who did poorly in the class dropped the majo
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by jtbetz22 1y ago
Oh wow, I appreciate this post as vivid reminder for how I grew to loathe being an EM at Google. Folks like this are pervasive in the org these days.
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by jtbetz22 2y ago
https://www.tabomagic.com I've been obsessed with making it easier to handle tab overload in the browser without requiring any sort of active "tab management". I have a working extension that replaces the "ne
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by jtbetz22 2y ago
Krapivin's work was a result of his study of the Tiny Pointers paper; his paper has already been linked in another response.
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by jtbetz22 2y ago
This is a fun read, and, unlike a lot of material on the Labs, goes back a lot further than 1947. As a software engineer, my favorite book on the topic is "Unix: A History and a Memoir" by Brian Kernighan. It tells many of the sam
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by jtbetz22 2y ago
This post reflects an insidious anti pattern in the practice of setting OKRs: "shipping the roadmap" is not the objective, it is a means to achieving some other underlying objective. With a well written objective / key result
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by jtbetz22 2y ago
You might like my extension: https://tabomagic.com . Bookmarks are hidden by default, but as soon as you type something into the search bar, all matching bookmarks show.
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by jtbetz22 2y ago
I built a chrome extension to optimize this workflow, because the address bar search in Chrome is terrible (as in: it requires you to @-mention what kind of thing you're searching for.) Ctrl-T opens a new tab page, <tab> highligh
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by jtbetz22 2y ago
I once had Brian as an "intern" on my team. It is definitely -not- a hard G.
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by jtbetz22 2y ago
Every hiring manager with any experience should anticipate that candidates are likely to negotiate. Therefore, any offer should be backed by logic of the form "we want to hire this candidate for $Y or less. We will make an initial of $
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by jtbetz22 2y ago
> Google codebase is arguably one of the most curated, and iterated on datasets in existence I spent 12 years of my career in the Google codebase. This assertion is technically correct in that google3 has been around for 20 years, and al
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by jtbetz22 2y ago
All great feedback, thank you! Adding the ability to view the full title is an easy fix, I'll include that in the next push. The history and bookmarks point is a good one. It's possible to specify those as optional permissions for

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