Agentic, agentic, a-d-gentic. (In Russian, ад means hell. Keep that in mind as we go.) Ctrl-b, right We added verification. Our agent spins in a feral loop, checking itself against a thousand linters. The strictest checks are running — checks you don’t even know exist — something like LintLikeAGodIsLookingAtYouStrictly. It is, as far as I can tell, very thorough. I have not read a single line of its output. ...
I remember when we used to repeat the mantra to each other — and from conference stages — that there is no silver bullet. It was practically a professional creed. And then AI showed up, and it turned out that wherever you add it, everything gets better. For managers. For products. For designers. For SaaS companies. Add AI to anything and it simply becomes better. Better how? Better in what way, exactly? And the way things worked before — why doesn’t that work anymore? Those are details. Digging into them feels almost impolite. So, anyway — the silver bullet is AI. ...
If an engineer at Big Tech can simply be fired, managers get hurt differently. They get converted into an IC — an Individual Contributor. On paper it’s a kind of tech lead: someone who both writes code and helps others write it. Except they code… so-so. The industry moved on without them During their years away from the keyboard, the industry changed so much that even the tools and the terms they used to rely on are gone. The ground they once stood on has been repaved twice. ...
Continuing the tokenmaxxing theme. Google says 75% of its code is written with AI. Meta says 90%. Uber burned a whole year’s worth of tokens in the first four months of the year. Programmers tokenmaxx. Managers token-flex — about how much their team spends on tokens per month, as if the API invoice were a performance review. Everything’s better with AI Need a status report? AI bot. Monitoring? AI bot. Code review? AI bot. Dashboard? AI bot. Every action a programmer takes, every automation, every cron job that used to be twelve lines of bash — must now go through an AI. Because everything’s better with AI. Obviously. ...
The internet borrowed the -maxxing suffix from the looksmaxxing crowd and bolted it onto everything. Sleepmaxxing, dopaminemaxxing, and now tokenmaxxing. So when people hear the word, they assume it means the obvious thing: pour the maximum number of tokens into the model. Dump the whole repository into the context window. Paste the entire PDF. Buy the million-token tier and use every last one of it. That is not tokenmaxxing. That is just spending money. The real thing is sneakier. ...
You can listen the full episode of the podacst here: https://javaswag.github.io/episode/78/ Interviewer: Welcome to this special interview, drawing on insights from the recent Java Swag podcast with Filipp, an architect at lektone.op. Filipp, thank you for joining us. Filipp: Glad to be here. Interviewer: You’ve had a long and varied career in programming. Could you start by telling us about your journey into Java and how you began writing industrial systems? ...
— Day 8: Treetop Tree House — The expedition comes across a peculiar patch of tall trees all planted carefully in a grid. The Elves explain that a previous expedition planted these trees as a reforestation effort. Now, they’re curious if this would be a good location for a tree house. First, determine whether there is enough tree cover here to keep a tree house hidden. To do this, you need to count the number of trees that are visible from outside the grid when looking directly along a row or column. ...
— Day 7: No Space Left On Device — You can hear birds chirping and raindrops hitting leaves as the expedition proceeds. Occasionally, you can even hear much louder sounds in the distance; how big do the animals get out here, anyway? The device the Elves gave you has problems with more than just its communication system. You try to run a system update: $ system-update –please –pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top Error: No space left on device Perhaps you can delete some files to make space for the update? ...
Day 4: Camp Cleanup https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/4 Space needs to be cleared before the last supplies can be unloaded from the ships, and so several Elves have been assigned the job of cleaning up sections of the camp. Every section has a unique ID number, and each Elf is assigned a range of section IDs. However, as some of the Elves compare their section assignments with each other, they’ve noticed that many of the assignments overlap. To try to quickly find overlaps and reduce duplicated effort, the Elves pair up and make a big list of the section assignments for each pair (your puzzle input). ...
Day 3: Rucksack Reorganization Advent Of Code 2022. Day 3 One Elf has the important job of loading all of the rucksacks with supplies for the jungle journey. Unfortunately, that Elf didn’t quite follow the packing instructions, and so a few items now need to be rearranged. Each rucksack has two large compartments. All items of a given type are meant to go into exactly one of the two compartments. The Elf that did the packing failed to follow this rule for exactly one item type per rucksack. ...