Benji Weber

New year's blog post on sources of resistance to XP, and helping teams overcome it without coercion. benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2025/01...

Fun Kobayashi Maru challenge at bend-lang.com

GPT isn't great at memes.

Claude's prediliction for calling me a linter makes me think how the tables have turned. "The linter removed the comment" "The linter already corrected it" "The linter renamed it"

I think AI is the best opening we've ever had to bring our engineering values to the mainstream, instead of the top single-digit-percent of teams it's always been. But nondeterminism will take more engineering discipline. Not less. charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/ai-demands...

If you have suddenly unlocked a superpower that allows everyone you employ to be 2x (4x, 10x, whatever) more efficient and your response is to lay off a bunch of people instead of *doing more stuff*, why do you even run a company?

📝 When moving fast, talking is the first thing to break daverupert.com/2026/04/more...

I put together a piece on how I'm doing co-design with agents in some of my dev work at the moment, and how there's a very specific through line from XP and the sort of software design and intentionality I talk about often. Trying to capture my working patterns. davidwhitney.co.uk/blog/2026/03...

I love this insight from @icooper.bsky.social - that AI tools can do coding but not programming. ian-cooper.writeas.com/coding-is-de...

If coding is your favorite part of software engineering, keep coding. AI doesn't stop you. But if coding was the only part you were good at, that's a different conversation. The job was always bigger than the code. #bransoncognac blog.bryanl.dev/posts/ai-sen...

The “swarm of agents” model assumes work naturally splits into roles: marketing, sales, support, development = basically mirroring human job titles. But those titles and siloes are a byproduct of org scaling, not a universal truth about work. www.joanwestenberg.com/agentic-swa...

XP practices have never been more helpful than with all the speed that agents provide. More brains, tighter feedback loops, quality & safety let us take full advantage of the speed. Never has "uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it" felt more relevant.

Excellent article (more reminders from history)

Whenever the topic of OKRs comes up, I think about Drucker vs Deming. Not a particularly topical thing to write about, but I think it's evergreen. surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/02/16/p...

Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

We optimized for ultra individualistic velocity measures defining DevEx at EXACTLY the wrong time no wonder everyone is exhausted and scared

#London things

New blog post on the high costs of coordination and the implications for large organizations: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/24/b...

Ooh. Ollama just released Anthropic API impersonation, meaning you can set the endpoint to a local port and be off to the races! docs.ollama.com/integrations...

Shame that @intellijidea.com can't complete this refactoring itself. Not ideal that the refactoring takes compiling code and creates code that fails to compile. #java

Trying to identify this bird. LLMs like insisting it's various varieties of Californian bird but this is taken in Scotland. White Tailed Eagle? Buzzard? Osprey?

It was at this moment I realised that slick tyres may not have been the optimal choice this morning #cycling

Sea otter

It's not bad out

And we're back. Again! Happy Holiday Trek 2025. 🎄🖖🏻🎄 #HolidayCombs www.youtube.com/watch?v=26H_...

I wrote a post about why I don't like the name that Amazon uses for their post-incident review process: "Correction of Error". surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/20/w...

I want to see daylight again, Gandalf, daylight.

Discovered there's a setting to change #intellij 's default infuriating behaviour of opening seemingly random tab when you drag/split editor views. I really wonder why "Most recently opened tab" is not the default.

I like parameterised tests but find #junit 's EnumSource/MethodSource etc dissatisfying. Here's how you can parameterize tests with #java records gist.github.com/benjiman/e9f...

Today I'm grumpy at Chrome putting "split view" where open in new window has been in every browser, building muscle memory for decades…for a feature that everyone's window manager already has.

And here’s an excellent post on how to apply them (most of this is not Ruby-specific): obie.medium.com/ruby-was-rea...

Hilarious and terrifying: jailbreak LLMs using poetry "These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols." arxiv.org/html/2511.15...

SUVs in London are really getting out of hand.

TDD is more important than ever

Microsoft: Operation failed, X is unlicensed, good luck figuring out what licence you need, (won't be called X). Google: Operation failed, you've hit a hard quota, good luck contacting a human to fix. Amazon: Everything worked, but good luck figuring out why you're paying 10x what you expected.

Wish people would stop trying to use their user-agent based guess as to which OS I want a download link for, to remove all other options from the page and/or show a "not supported" page. It's tiresome having to keep changing user agent to get the right downloads.

"we didn't actually have a good idea, we had the freedom to actually spend time and go and work on it, and even more importantly, we didn't have any pressure that was coming down from management, No pressure to work on any particular project, publish a number of papers to push a certain metric up."

It turns out techniques used by top software engineering teams help accelerate coding agents as well: Version control, documentation, careful planning, automated tests, linters, strong code review culture, really thorough QA Sophisticated processes for professional engineers

The trouble with these electronic wing mirrors on buses now is one can't see if the bus driver is paying attention when #cycling. Why wouldn't the bus driver be paying attention you ask?

I'm not sure this email marketing was targeted at engineers.

Very cool and good to see that Discord have leaked a bunch of people’s IDs that they were forced to send in when automated age verification failed. It’s a shame nobody predicted this extremely obvious outcome of the OSA. ID fraudsters will have a field day!

`if(true) throw new RuntimeException();` Probably my most typed line of Java.

Unit tests are one of the fastest and cheapest ways to not only validate your work, but to stop regressions (and hallucinations!) If it doesn't compile or if the tests don't pass: it's *definitely* broken!

Oh good, It has infected the devtools now.

New blog post on the trade-offs of fine-grained progressive rollouts surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/09/13/t...

oh: oh good, you're back, I don't need to ask Claude this

There are worse morning commutes #cycling

realistic Star Trek

Top trolling by YouTube.

ChatGPT, create a new Holmes-type mystery with an adversary capable of defeating Data.