Vectors of Attack
I’ve thought for a long time that most of the major movements I’ve been involved in were attempts to attack the same problems in different ways.
I don’t mean, what’s the next big hype wave, I mean “where are the smart people who are trying to make better software, and make better software makers”.
I got into patterns by reading OOPSLA proceedings in the university library. I got into objects by way of C++ in 1992 in college when they were still teaching us C and COBOL. I got into Agile in 1999 when it was still called “Lightweight Process”. I got into Rails in the early days of that too. I can see my move into Apple platforms now, in hindsight, as a kind of Product Engineering thinking rather than Project thinking.
I see them all as vectors of attack on the same problem. Work on design, work on process, work on language, work on management etc.
I’ve been trying to see what I think the next thing is that I want to dive into and LLMs have really shaken the snow globe so I can’t see clearly. LLM is not the thing, but it colours all the other things.
I think it might be Observability. If we cede the problem of code generation to LLMs and use everything we learned from patterns, encapsulation, testing and low cost of change, and product thinking to help the LLM make good decisions, the next place to focus on is runtime.
Not the code at all, but the running system.
LLM snow makes it hard to see, but that’s what I’m going to be diving into.