Alan Buxton

AI and the changing role of the computer programmer Prompted by a comment on a recent LinkedIn post, here are some notes that have informed what I think about the programmer's job in 2026. To set the scene, here is a LinkedIn post I did in 2024 that got quite a lot of both love and hate: For many…

Analogies I’ve found helpful when thinking about AI replacing jobs AI tools mean that anyone can be a programmer/lawyer/graphic designer/insert any other white collar job. At least, to a degree that has never been remotely possible before. Does that mean there is no role any more for programmers…

...man wait a fucking second we are very proximal to "dungeons and dragons leads to the summoning of demons that kill everyone". 80s moms were right

I'm going to stop talking about "Minimum Viable Product" and instead start talking about "Minimum Valuable Product" "Viable" is too unclear a term. It has to deliver some value.

AGI will change all jobs out there because they are relatively straightforward, as far as I can see from the outside. My job, that I am familiar with all the nuance and subtleties of, is too complex to be fully replaced by a machine.

More nuance when talking about AI Safety please. The term "AI" is super broad, like "vehicle". Different types of vehicle need different safety regimes. Same with AI.

Is Claude getting worse or are my expectations getting higher?

Rogue AI won’t be the end of humanity over the next 10 years. Or, another reason for serious journalists to not get their analysis from X. Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, wrote on X he personally thinks chances of AI destroying humanity is more than 10%. His post kicked off a…

The Hype is hurting my brain In the run-up to their IPO, SpaceX said their TAM was $28.5 Trillion. Funnily enough, Dario Amodei from Anthropic has now come up with $30 Trillion for his TAM. It's a pissing contest about who can say the biggest number and keep a straight face. And people who…

My last 48 hours experience with Claude is a lot of: "You're right, and the failure is a bit sharper than you framed it." "So my steer last turn was wrong for what you want." etc. Perhaps I'm just in a use case that it wasn't designed for, but it feels like AGI is slipping further away

A common pattern I'm seeing with Claude Code: "and corrects something I said earlier."

Today Claude made up a new word: "re-pend" for "to make pending again". I almost just took it at face value.

TIL that postgres pg_restore for a single table doesn't also restore its indexes. Nice.

In praise of smaller large language models Part of my side-project's codebase uses Flan T5 XL for some generative tasks. Flan T5 is an LLM that was released in October 2022. The XL version that I use has 3 billion parameters. Might sound like a lot but it's small by modern standards. Kimi K3 has…

"Very informative — and it overturns my earlier assumption." Is what Claude wrote this morning when I told it to run a particular failing regression test. Shows how important tests are. Not even high-faluting evals but good old fashioned integration tests.

Benchmarking Coding Agents on Databricks’ Multi-Million Line Codebase They ran a comprehensive evaluation on our tasks, code base, infra. It's been produced by more than 3,000 software engineers, spans 3 hyperscalar clouds and many languages and tasks. www.databricks.com/blog/benchma...

Check in on Syracuse Progress Syracuse Company News has been working really well on company news (better than the alternatives), but on industry news it hasn’t been so strong. It has been improving so I asked Claude Opus 4.8 to review Syracuse’s performance on industry news since March based on…

Today Fable told me: "don't let the LLM derive facts that code can compute." Seems like a good guideline for working in this wacky world of AI.

“We can’t ask AI, it lies” vs “Here is my superpower prompt” It’s well-documented that Gen Z / Gen Alpha are not exactly fans of AI1. And that older professionals can’t live without it. My own 9 year-old kid has told me that games made with AI are terrible and that “we can’t ask AI, it lies” (in…

My 9 year old boy wants to write a Roblox game. The tutorial gives you an option to do it yourself or to use AI assistant. He didn't want to use AI. Because he's said that he has seen people use AI in games and their games are just, "bad".

My Claude Code editor still tells me that I have Fable included in my plan limits till June 22. But obvs Fable doesn't exist right now. I wonder what happens if Fable gets reactivated on June 23?

Noticed my first use of ad-supported ChatGPT today. They did it really well. I asked a question, got an answer as expected and then, after the answer, there was a small ad related to the topic. Nicely done.

Two Things Can Be True: Anthropic’s new Fable I received two newsletter subscriptions within an hour of each other today regarding Anthropic's new Mythos-class AI model, named Fable. First, Ethan Mollick getting blown away by Fable's capabilities, then Gary Marcus being a lot more cynical about…

Two surprising things I heard at Snowflake Summit Joe Moura, CEO at Crew AI If it's a problem that the system gives a different answer each time, then maybe it shouldn't be an agent. This one cuts through a lot of the hype. Agents are amazing at many things, but it doesn't mean they are the right…

AI vs Memento Working with Claude Code makes me feel like I'm in Memento, the 2000 film about someone trying to solve a mystery. The twist is that he can't make new memories. Every time he figures out something he has to resort to a patchwork of notes and tattoos so he has something to start from…

How do you benchmark a product you built yourself? I built a company-news API and I wanted to know whether it was better than the alternatives. The problem: I'm the author, so I'm biased — and I wanted to use an LLM as the judge, which makes it worse, because a model that recognises my product…

What makes a good data person? I found myself talking to two different data leaders last week in two different places. Two different leaders who work in completely different areas. Completely different. Yet they both used the same word to describe a great data person: "Curiosity". A curious data…

It’s a pause-calypse. AI is shifting the value from "renting software" to "owning intelligence." SaaS isn't dying, but the era of bloated subscriptions is; tools must now prove their worth by integrating deeply into custom AI workflows. Adapt or fade. — gen1e.xyz

SaaSpocalypse or SaaS-pause-calypse? The death of SaaS in the age of AI - e.g. people building and running their own CRM systems rather than using Salesforce - is overstated. I think we are more in a pause-calypse than an apocalypse1. The hype is overbearing. There is no end of people writing…

Today's programming facepalm: Realizing I didn't have an index on a foreign key. Everything working a lot better now :D

AI uplifts your capabilities, but also forces you to uplift yourself This is a story based on some work I'm doing on my side project, syracuse.1145.am. It's an example about how with AI I can do much more than what I could do before and how I had to level up my thinking to make the most of it. The…

What does “AI” even mean in 2026? Remember in the "BC" times (Before ChatGPT) when AI meant something different to what it does now? It's what we saw in science fiction films. It was something that either felt human-like or felt super-human. It was more likely to be logical than creative, but it…

UK Govt Entrepreneurs Call For Evidence is missing a critical question. Good news: The UK govt is looking for input into its strategy for encouraging more entrepeneurship. Link here in case any of my network have not yet submitted their views: It ends on 28th Feb so please do go ahead if you…

All this AI agent stuff going on and the real AI feature I would love is an AI that can tell me where my phone is.

Why the AI disruption feels different. Gen AI is changing everything. Gen AI is a bubble. Gen AI is coming for your job. The current AI disruption is getting more coverage than previous ones I've seen. It's because of the sorts of jobs that it is disrupting. It's affecting programmers. When social…

Aaargh the pain is real #claudecode

Ok I give up. I'll read the New Yorker article about if Claude is conscious, given that you lot are all quoting it.

After hours struggling with getting Microsoft Copilot to help convert some Loop pages to Loop components I gave up and asked ChatGPT. It helped me straight away. Go figure. TBH this isn't a "ChatGPT good, Copilot bad" post. It's "if one AI tool isn't doing it for you, try another one" post.

foreign [Music] Klangphonics recently turned up on my YouTube recommendations. Great musicianship, great sounds. Like the best bits of 1990's Trance. Love them. Here are some screenshots from one of their YouTube recordings with YouTube's auto-subtitles. At first, I found it entertaining how…

Nice subtle touch on this week's Private Eye cover.

Wow! Syracuse beats Perplexity! My side project made almost a clean sweep of the AI analysis of the latest head-to-head between Syracuse, LinkUp and Perplexity. Grok, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all favoured Syracuse. CoPilot preferred LinkUp. Feeling quite proud because middle of last year there…

Watching my kids get obsessed by the likes of Timberborn or Alchemy Factory or those Roblox Tycoon games and wondering about the appeal. Then I remember how much Civ and Civ II took over my life in the 90's. Everything that happens has already happened and all that.

nuclear take a new quality of "good code" is components are straightforward to modify or enhance without side effects via LLM

The AI's loved my side project. But were they just telling me what I wanted to hear? I asked someone else to do the same comparison. His AI's gave him some different results.

Small Large Language Models, Claude and Typesense Some notes from putting together this little demo around Typesense. Claude did most of the heavy lifting, I only had to fix the following: it used typesense 26, not 29 Claude used a GET which didn't allow for a long enough query so I had to change…

The Next Nik? Lot's of talk about Nik Storonsky of Revolut leaving the UK for tax-friendlier climes. But what about people like: Sophie Tharnton Priya Nakamura Gabriel Hortley Dmitri Castellanos What about them? What about the people in the UK working on something today that will turn into as much…

thanks to claude code i might actually ship the thing i wanted to make back in 2021 but didn't have the patience for. incredible time for people with vision and skill but low execution velocity

the best productivity system ever: 1. open a blank note/page 2. list all tasks for today 3. mark 3-5 most important with a star 4. complete those tasks 5. repeat steps 3 and 4 until you're tired stop wasting time overthinking your "perfect" system

AI by the kilo One of my least favourite jobs is answering this RFP question: "How are you using AI in your product?" I understand the intent behind the question. As a buyer of software, you want some confidence that your vendor is up to speed on the latest technology. You want some confidence…