Kristofer Palmvik.

The valuable part of an open source contribution was never the code. It was the understanding. Someone found a problem, understood it well enough to describe it, maybe understood the codebase well enough to propose a fix. The code was a vehicle for that understanding. Now the code is free and the understanding is what's scarce. A detailed bug report with reproduction steps and a clear description of expected versus actual behavior is worth more than ten agent-generated PRs. It always was. The gap has just gotten enormous.

The productivity gains from these models are real, and so is the friction and understanding that come from engaging with the work on a tangible and frequent basis. Despite the countless failed attempts at trying to democratize coding while not understanding coding, we're faced with the reality that you cannot understand code without engaging with it. And it's become clear that if you don't keep engaging and writing it, you can lose touch with that understanding, which will in turn make you a less capable orchestrator in the first place, rendering this phase of AI coding a strange and needlessly stressful interlude.

The PocketOS boss puts greater blame on Railway’s architecture than on the deranged AI agent for the database’s irretrievable destruction. Briefly, the cloud provider's API allows for destructive action without confirmation, it stores backups on the same volume as the source data, and “wiping a volume deletes all backups.” Crane also points out that CLI tokens have blanket permissions across environments.

Example Mapping helps you zoom in and focus on the smallest pieces of behaviour inside your story. By mapping it out you can tease apart the rules, find the core of the behaviour you want, and defer the rest until later. With this level of scrutiny, example mapping acts like a filter, preventing big fat stories from getting into your sprint and exploding with last-minute surprises three days before demo-day.

I keep asking myself: What happened to the principles that were professed a decade ago? To address climate change? To reduce racial, gender, and economic inequality? To “don’t be evil”? Were these principles abandoned, or were they merely born of convenience? Has tech always been like this? Was I just blind to it before?