Jody Salt

Why I hate abbreviations in code

I am pretty relaxed and pragmatic when it comes to coding standards As long as there are sensible and consistent conventions that have been agreed on by reasonably sane people I am generally OK However there is just one thing I just can t let go and th...

Momentum over perfection

Do you ever find yourself stuck procrastinating because you just want to make sure the current thing you are working on is perfect before moving on It can be hard moving on when you know that there are warts still lurking even if these warts don t have...

Protect your LLM's context window by delegating to subagents

I have previously talked about why you should keep your large language model s context window as small as possible in The importance of looking after your LLM s context window the importance of looking after your llm s context window One of the main wa...

How to parallelise your Playwright tests in your CI pipeline

If you want to be productive as a software engineer and be able to ship software you need a reproducible feedback loop that tells you when things are broken To achieve this we use automated tests If our tests take a long time to run our productivity wi...

The importance of looking after your LLM's context window

When you send a chat message to a large language model LLM the text you enter gets converted into a list of numbers each one representing a fragment of text The LLM then generates a response as a list of numbers which then get converted back to each nu...

Is it worth learning a new programming language now that AI is here?

Cost of writing code with AI is now practically zero If a coding agent can write code for you in any language do we really need to learn a new language What would be the point In order to validate the output of AI we have to know what we are looking at...

Think about the feedback loop

Coding agents work best when there is a feedback loop that allows them to check their results In software engineering this typically means some sort of testing When working with your agent to add a new feature also work on the feedback loop the testing...

The importance of automating the right things

The danger of automation is that if you are not careful you can end up automating things that just don t matter as well as the things you do The by product of this is that you can end up creating a lot of work for yourself that doesn t contribute to yo...

One day at a time

Today I am reminded that everything that can be achieved can only ever be achieved one day at a time The advice isn t mine it comes from the AA https www aa org and it is something I regularly come back to and reflect upon when life gets difficult When...

The trust ladder: how much do you trust your AI agents?

There is a lot of buzz about AI software factories at the moment One of the big questions in this area is how can I trust the code is good when no human has reviewed it There is an interview between Lauren Tan aka Poteto and Matt Pocock that has some g...