← People and their mental models
5 claims Jon Seager made fit 5 mental models. Most often: Everything decays without maintenance, Leverage, Margin of safety. Everything they said here.
Institutions, code, cities and knowledge run down by default; keeping something alive is work that has to be paid for.
Their wordsBut perhaps most obviously, when you don't release often, your team gets worse at releasing.
Tools, code, capital and debt multiply what one person can do, in both directions.
Their wordsAI is not going to take software engineering jobs at Canonical, but other software engineers who are highly competent with AI tools certainly could.
Leave room for being wrong, because sometimes you will be.
Their wordsGenerated code should be treated as untrusted until there is evidence that it preserves the desired behaviour.
Set up your situation, rules and defaults so the good choice is the easy one, instead of relying on willpower.
Their wordsIf you care about such constraints (function length, etc.), encode them as lints rather than hoping the agent internalises your preferences.
Every model, word or plan is a simplified map of reality; useful when its structure matches, misleading when mistaken for the thing itself.
Their wordsplausible-looking output is not evidence that the translated program behaves like its source.