@thorsten-ball · 52 positions · 2 changes of mind · On ppll ↗
Co-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcast. Wrote Writing an Interpreter in Go.
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Each column is a stretch of time in which the same views came up; a new column starts when one appears or goes quiet. Quiet means nothing on it in our sources for that stretch, which is not the same as a change of mind; Dropped means they said they no longer hold it; tap the card for which claim and when. Revised means the view carries on but one of its claims was dropped. Each row is one view, in the same place all the way along. The number is how many claims in that stretch; we hold 3 in 2015, 0 in 2016, 1 in 2017, 0 in 2018, 3 in 2019, 9 in 2020, 0 in 2021, 4 in 2022, 0 in 2023, 0 in 2024, 1 in 2025, 35 in 2026.
Simple, minimal code beats clever code: every extra line, abstraction and dependency carries weight
Their wordsBut there are a lot more cases in which meta-programming is unnecessary and additional baggage on top of the solution, which gets in the way of understanding what the code is supposed to do.
Their wordsCode has mass. Every additional line of code you don't need is ballast. It weighs your codebase down, making it harder to steer and change direction if you need to.
Their wordsIf what's holding you back from shipping is, say, getting more customer input, or a brittle release process, or flaky monitoring, or missing tests, then all the bot does is to add noise. It doesn't help you ship.
Their wordsAnother thing that needs to be fixed when it ultimately breaks down, another bit of automation that works 99% of the time, but starts making funny noises when you slip into the 1%
Their wordsIf you're not comfortable typing a lot and you'd rather not write something down then typing is the bottleneck and you need to fix it. Typing is not something you should need to think about.
Thorsten BallCo-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcastall the fiddling with worktrees, with custom tab management, and notifications systems, and agent spawn wrappers is as productive as someone changing colorschemes in Vim eighteen times per day.↗@thorstenball on Xx.com · 8 Oct 2026
Their wordsall the fiddling with worktrees, with custom tab management, and notifications systems, and agent spawn wrappers is as productive as someone changing colorschemes in Vim eighteen times per day.
Their wordsif you often need to get everyone in the same room to discuss and decide on something, you probably have too many people discussing and deciding things.
Their wordswhen the main communication channels are asynchronous text and video calls (as would be the case in a remote work setup) the influence of the loudest person in the room wanes. It's transferred to the best communicators.
Their wordsThe craft of writing code will disappear. Yes, there are still Italian shoe makers around. But look at your feet. The craft of building software will be more important than ever.
Their wordsThere’s no proof that “good code” will matter in the future. The notion of “good code” itself is mostly based on the idea that it’s easy/cheap/efficient for humans to work with. But humans won’t modify the majority of code.
Thorsten BallCo-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcastWhat will matter in future is runtime behavior: Performance characteristics, resource usage, failure modes, observability, debuggability, deployments, rollbacks. And legibility of all that to agents.↗@thorstenball on Xx.com · 25 Sept 2026
Their wordsWhat will matter in future is runtime behavior: Performance characteristics, resource usage, failure modes, observability, debuggability, deployments, rollbacks. And legibility of all that to agents.
Thorsten BallCo-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcastIf it works, if it's performant, if it has no bugs, if you understand how it works, if the agent can modify it a month from now, to your liking, is it slop?↗@thorstenball on Xx.com · 2 Oct 2026
Their wordsIf it works, if it's performant, if it has no bugs, if you understand how it works, if the agent can modify it a month from now, to your liking, is it slop?
Their wordsin the future, humans won’t find a bug or an issue with the code produced by a model, at least not in a reasonable time. Humans will only review the system and its composition, but it won’t be in PRs and it won’t be by looking through every line of the code.
Their wordsTokens are the new computing paradigm. Everything will be re-made on top of it. We’ve had deterministic computers for 80 years, so we confuse “how computers have worked” with “how computers must work.” We’re entering the post-binary era.
Their wordsThe terminal is dead. Most developer tooling will be washed away by tokens. Shells, text editors, CLI tools won’t be used by humans anymore. There’s no need to know command line flags and jq invocations anymore.
Their wordsA lot of UI exists because software can’t understand what you want. Menus, settings screens, dashboards, filters: much of it is a human-accessible API to a dumb machine. Smart machines need much less UI.
Their wordsOpen source in its current form doesn’t make sense anymore. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is still true but now we have artificial eyeballs
Thorsten BallCo-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcastWith agents you can now move 10x faster, you can finally do real continuous integration, and get more confidence in the changes the agent made.↗@thorstenball on Xx.com · 16 Oct 2026
Their wordsWith agents you can now move 10x faster, you can finally do real continuous integration, and get more confidence in the changes the agent made.
Thorsten BallCo-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcastit's now much faster and easier to change code. Years ago a wrong decision could cause days and weeks of refactoring. Now? Probably less.↗@thorstenball on Xx.com · 17 Oct 2026
Their wordsit's now much faster and easier to change code. Years ago a wrong decision could cause days and weeks of refactoring. Now? Probably less.
Thorsten BallCo-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcastYou can now have a team that ships fast, ships a lot, makes a ton of money, delights customers, builds a great product that's beloved AND no code reviews, no PRs, without yoloing to main.↗@thorstenball on Xx.com · 17 Oct 2026
Their wordsYou can now have a team that ships fast, ships a lot, makes a ton of money, delights customers, builds a great product that's beloved AND no code reviews, no PRs, without yoloing to main.
Thorsten BallCo-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcastIncreasingly convinced: people who do best with agents are those that are good at shipping things in small pieces↗@thorstenball on Xx.com · 24 Sept 2026
Their wordsIncreasingly convinced: people who do best with agents are those that are good at shipping things in small pieces
Thorsten BallCo-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcastIf TTFT is important to you, you're doing something wrong. Don't wait for the agents, make them wait for you.↗@thorstenball on Xx.com · 25 Sept 2026
Their wordsIf TTFT is important to you, you're doing something wrong. Don't wait for the agents, make them wait for you.
Their wordsAnd what we consider a smart model today will be considered very dumb in the future. But a smarter model makes less mistakes, needs fewer turns.
Thorsten BallCo-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcastBiggest source of confusion is that everyone - spent wildly different # of tokens in last 2 years - works in diff codebases - with diff languages - and diff requirements - in diff teams - with diff processes - in diff companies and then says "models are [good|bad]"↗@thorstenball on Xx.com · 1 Oct 2026
Their wordsBiggest source of confusion is that everyone - spent wildly different # of tokens in last 2 years - works in diff codebases - with diff languages - and diff requirements - in diff teams - with diff processes - in diff companies and then says "models are [good|bad]"