Am I the only one who looks at guys like Addy Osmani and Steve Yegge who before LLM's had a good reputation and since then get the feeling they are cashing that reputation in to ride the LLM hype-cycle? Or is it just a matter of professional tech talking heads moving from writing books and giving conference talks about good engineering practices to talking about the new hot topic that sells books and conference tickets?
Honestly, things like this just depress me. Someone makes a mistake and then they try to cover themselves by saying "Yeah I am somewhat to blame, but look at all these other things that are more to blame". They seem responsible by appearing to take accountability but in actuality are pushing accountability onto everyone else before themselves.
Then, to get clicks and attention we then ask the AI to write some kind of "confession". It's a probability engine, it has no thoughts or feelings you can hurt or shame into doing better, it has no long term memory to burn the embarrassment of this into and in fact given the same circumstances it is probable that the agent would do the same thing again and again no matter how many confessions you have it write or how mean you write to it.
Ultimately, you are the operator of the machine and the AI, and despite what OpenAI/Anthropic/Whomever say, you are required to exist because the machine cannot operate without you being there nor can it be accountable for what it does.
1) Do you not feel self-conscious or weird about calling this "EvanFlow"? Seems like a lot of people these days are naming their AI tools/skills/whatever after themselves which seems self-absorbed. Either that or they hope that if their thing takes off like OpenClaw did then they'll grab the fame that comes along with it.
2) Why does your TDD flow miss the refactor step of TDD?
Let the guy have something. Free and open source developers work tirelessly for free for years supporting software that billion dollar companies use to make huge profits.
We don't question when scientists name stuff after themselves so why question this? At least he gets some recognition for his work.
1): you have things backwards, the EvanFlow is not something i came up with but rather something i discovered similar to the dao. i am named Evan after the EvanFlow not the other way around.
2): you're right and dmitry called this out below too. shipped a fix that puts REFACTOR per-cycle, instead of being a deferred "after all tests pass" step. the old step 4 was iterate-shaped not TDD-shaped.
> 1): you have things backwards, the EvanFlow is not something i came up with but rather something i discovered similar to the dao. i am named Evan after the EvanFlow not the other way around.
"Evenflo is a hundred year old infant feeding brand." Probably named to market its baby bottles and accessories.
Everybody who grew up to listen to Pearl Jam had seen or used an Evenflo pacifier, baby bottle, or car seat. That's one reason the song already sounded so familiar.
1) Do you feel weird asking a question like this? What constructive benefit does it add to any dialogue?
Sometimes it’s helpful to ask oneself what’s the benefit of an answer. I cannot think of any for your question and the way you worded it is a bit cringe. People name things after themselves all the time. It does not matter in the slightest.
> Models are getting 99% more efficient every 3 years - to get the same amount of output, combined with hardware and (mostly) software upgrades - you can use 99% less power.
This is such a poor argument for a number of reasons.
1. Three years ago is basically when the "AI race" really kicked off amongst the frontier companies. You're effectively comparing a car from the 1920/30's to a modern car.
2. Past performance is not an indicator of future performance. You can't just say that LLM's will grow and improve at a fixed rate for all time, that isn't how they or anything else works in the real world.
3. Since it's an open secret that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are running their models at a loss, a static 99% cheaper every three years arc still puts these companies at a net negative position unless compute, energy and water all somehow start getting 99% cheaper every three years.
I realize that the example is contrived, but what is the point of writing a test of a fibonacci function if your test harness is designed to just take whatever it tells you and updates the assert to verify that what it told you is indeed what it just told you.
This assumes the code you wrote is already correct and giving the correct answer, so why bother writing tests? If, however you accept that you may have got it wrong, figure out the expected outcome through some reliable means (in this case, dig out your old TI-89), get the result and write your test to assert against a known correct value.
I wouldn't trust any tests that are written this way.
Oftentimes, the main purpose of writing the tests is to prevent future regressions. This is pretty common for instance in ML (pytorch) code. You put in some tests with various random inputs and assert it against whatever your network says the output is. That way you don't accidentally change how the network works in future refactors.
These are great to test code that has no formal specification or oracle, so you're writing a reference implementation.
First, the test fails because there's no expected output, and you get to check the existing behaviour pretty-printed. Then, if it's correct, you approve it by promoting the diff into the source code, and it becomes a regression test.
Hmm, yes, I know that one and one of the reasons why I considered the naming weird. Original Tcl expect is rather automation than testing in the slot in my mind it occupies, even if it maybe could be (badly) used as a testing tool.
I believe it's called test-driven development but often I write tests hoping that what I tell myself the application code will do does what I want it to do. It's also self-describing of the changes made, and what people new to the codebase should reference if they actually want to learn what's going on.
And that's why the example is good. As you first get fib(3) then see the result, verify it and then freeze and then do for fib(20). That's how software development works that you can spot errors easier than a test could.
I'm willing to admit I may be the odd one out here, but I find this entire article to paint the author as self-entitled and manipulative.
> One might even call the art of accepting generosity a type of compassion.
People may feel good about themselves after performing an act of kindness, but this sentence makes it sound like the author is gifting them the opportunity to go out of their way to do things for him.
And all of these stories of wandering around Asia for eight years sound more like he deliberately put himself in positions to guilt people who culturally feel obligated towards generosity. These don't read like stories of kindness to me, but someone bragging about all the people he manipulated, and then recycled all these stories of manipulation into some ridiculous idea that he is the truly compassionate and kind person because he is accepting their kindness.
So not only are we measuring lines of code as a productivity metric as though that has any actual relation to productivity, but across the board they are boasting that lines of code is going up and PR density is getting bigger as well.
Those numbers should be seen as a giant red flag, not as any kind of positive.
I understand the intention of what the author is trying to achieve, but I think the problem they will run into is how do you define "evil" in a legal document or license? There is a subset of acts and beliefs that wider society has deemed "evil", but I doubt large corporations are actively supporting sexual assault, torture, murder etc. What the author is referring to is things they find morally reprehensible but do not reach the level of the aforementioned acts enough to be expressly illegal and evil (and whether they are or not, IANAL).
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