Jessica Kerr

I don’t wanna “build software” so much as build understanding and express it in software.

TFW you're finally ready to record this important, time-pressure video And Camtasia won't open And you spend an hour reinstalling and fighting it and waiting for it to beachball It was probably the license server. @TechSmith that was some really valuable time down the drain

The work of software dev has switched from mainly "how do I make it work" to mainly "how will I know it works?" and I am here for it. This part of the problem is hard and juicy.

We hadn't heard of symmathesy before either. @jessitron from @honeycombio joined us on the BugBash podcast to talk about treating software as a teammate, how anything an AI can't understand is becoming "legacy code," and why our most important human contribution is moving from writing lines of code to orchestrating the flows of learning across the entire system.

Claude is down. Guess it's time to try codex cli. [Tries codex cli] Is Claude up yet?

The new servant leadership: we serve the agents by telling what to do 9/9/6

Razer headset that turns itself off while I'm recording is theoretically configurable by software which is a huge pain to install, and then no, it doesn't work on Mac. Others of their headsets aren't supported at all. such a waste of time, cannot recommend

also this gives me a way to say "Thanks, that was great!" without wasting tokens. It comes with "end session."

Easy tip, big improvements: In user-level prompt (like CLAUDE.md): "When I say 'end session', that's your chance to write down notes for future-you." At the end of each chat, I say "end session," and then it updates memories or docs. It can now improve over time!

the agent just added some logging to the web page, and they didn't show up in Honeycomb, and it figured out that the version of the web SDK was too old to have logging and I didn't have to go through that pain! AI is good today

jfc this headset just shut itself off, silently, while i was recording voice for a video Because it wasn't receiving sound?? I don't know? Gaming headsets are so freaking useless!! (Razer blackshark v2 pro, purchased because it has a good mic... when it works)

@andymac4182 as we should!!

@jessitron Feels like we are reinventing man pages.

New AI habit: install a new cli tool. Tell it to explore how to use the tool and write its own skill and leave itself notes. This builds the context it needs right there in the project, for exactly what's relevant to how we'll use it

@brunoborges If it was important I could do the search myself and then we'd have both sets of needed changes. But in internal project docs, if it was just me, they'd simply remain inconsistent!

@jessitron What we should be asking is whether the agent itself forgot to change any spot... We only review where changed happened, not changes that should have happened!

it's just so satisfying when the agent goes and updates all the documentation in places I would totally miss

Another new AI habit: Find a new cli tool. Download its repo and have Claude check whether it looks safe. Foolproof? NO. Better than nothing? feels like it

How to make an app: 1. The AI creates a perfectly fine version 2. Change everything.

I don't have the implementation for this yet but it's clearly possible. The possibilities for system structure here are fascinating.

When the unit of worker is not "human" but "LLM call," we can size very differently. Different Feature Owners could discuss among themselves and find solutions, ongoingly. We could even _measure_ the cost of increasing feature interactions by counting the tokens in these convos.

the invisible requirement to every new feature: "... and everything else still works" I bet we can do something new for this with agents.