Ben Vinegar

@ben-vinegar · 22 positions · On ppll ↗

Co-founder of Modem, and before it VP of Engineering at Sentry. Joined Sentry as its founding engineer; builds hunk.dev and runs the DevTools Toronto meetup. Posts as @bentlegen.

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What Ben Vinegar says most about

coding agents 4

Software only gets good by being used a lot by the people building it, so time spent inside coding agents instead of the app is time that makes the app worse.
With coding agents, working out the shape in lower-fidelity mock-ups first beats having the agent build it and then fixing the code: it takes fewer tokens and puts you on a better path.

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LLMs 3

Programming languages that LLMs do not choose, like Ruby and Zig, look dead in the long term.
LLMs love code with explicit inputs and outputs and no side effects, so the functional programmers were right.

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open source 2

Anyone getting into making software should first build open source and show they can get anybody to use anything, because that is really hard.
Demand for open source feels lower than it has in a while, because people can generate the code they want and companies will use whatever gets them to market fastest, black box or not.

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