Fran Díaz

Let's start by stating the obvious: The corporate behemoths are dictatorial, soulless hellholes that dehumanize people and do active harm to their employees. (Now tell us what you really think, Allen 😄.) Every one of them (at least the ones I've seen) is vastly ineffective in how they do 1/8

AI makes your work harder, not easier. I think of it as work density—the percent of time spent expending brain cells. The denser the work, the more exhausting it is. If you have 10 agents running at once, you have 10x the context swaps, each of which requires recovery time. 1/5

"Here’s Sam Altman again: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.” But is it truly theirs to sell? I am one among hundreds of thousands of authors whose books Anthropic has used without permission to train its LLM."

🧵 One thing that concerns me about the current AI mania is what I see as people embracing full on nihilism - the "nothing matters" philosophy. - "LLMs have a massive environmental cost? Doesn't matter, because *future smarter* AI will solve climate change." 1/7

32 years ago today, we held the launch party for DOOM II at the Limelight in NYC, a former church. Happy birthday to DOOM II, but also, happy birthday to the Super Shotgun, the be-all and end-all of many a monster.

Over a year ago I met an Anthropic employee at a conference and at one point she mentioned that one of the things she was working on was whether or not it was cruel to ever turn off an AI model. I thought she was joking. She was not.

More and more, I think the *role* of a team-level "Agile coach" or equivalent is patronizing at best, scapegoating at worst. My problem is that the "coach" role is all about blaming the team. The assumption is that the overall organization is just fine, but the team needs some work. 1/7

elon musk has more empathy for lines of code than a majority of humanity

Contemporary frontier models are not conscious.

Margaret Hamilton, trailblazer whose software powered Apollo 11 moon landing, dies at 90

In the face of generative AI coding agents, the role of human-led architecture becomes even more important in the crafting of software-intensive systems.

"AI is an industry led by psychos" by @brettcodes.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLkE...

Frankly, I find relegating hiring to an AI incredibly off-putting. I would never consider working for a company that thinks the hiring decision is so unimportant that it doesn't need to involve humans. It doesn't bode well. 3/4

I am less worried about the cyber attacks from Ai agents and more about the cyber attacks against Ai agents. The first would be an attacker using a model to carry out attacks. LLMs often make this annoyingly hard, they refuse too much. To jailbreak them you need trained criminals which are rare.

Getting busier with busywork example of the week

A fortnight of headlines about AI killing us all, and the thing actually coming at us is getting little attention as a result. It's not the models getting smarter, it's that we're wiring them up to everything, and nobody has worked out how to do that safely yet. blog.robbowley.net/2026/09/18/t...

In amongst all the AI madness, people seem to have forgotten that the point of working in very small increments with very frequent releases is to get feedback sooner so that we can adjust what we're building to best meet our customers' needs. 1/5

The largest corpus of autochrome photographs (70k of them) comes from French baker Albert Kahn. Here are a couple of his photos from Morocco & Algeria, ca. 1913 & 1910. You can read more about him at the links below. publicdomainreview.org/essay/albert... mymodernmet.com/albert-kahn-...

Job applicants are using AI to write resumes and prep interview answers. Companies are using AI to screen those applications and conduct initial interviews. We’ve officially automated both sides of a process meant to measure human connection. The irony is genuinely unreal.

Interesting article, I've seen a few articles recently from experienced XP background type folks saying they're dropping lower level TDD in favour of more outside in acceptance/E2E test driven approach

What’s the problem w using LLMs to write stuff you want other people to read -emails, articles, posts- and why are people (like me!) so incredibly hostile that they will block you/mute you/block your domain, to never read anything from you again? Bryan spells it out. Read it:

I do not fear the rise of artificial intelligence. But I do fear the rise of a small set of billionaires and companies who seek to build such things to increase their power and their wealth, all without transparency or accountability.

for the haters - bad news, i am afraid. literally every Fortune 500 company is using AI to develop their products and services. in many cases they're no longer even doing manual code review. i hate to break it to you, but if you won't use services built using AI you just checked out of modern life.

Why does EventStorming insist on past-tense sticky notes? "Order placed." "Payment confirmed." "Item dispatched." It forces precision. It anchors the room in shared reality instead of assumptions. We broke down the full grammar in our latest blog post: buff.ly/bieandh

One hallmark of a lousy app is that it's chock full of features. A good app does one critical and necessary thing well. A pile of features typically does nothing but add clutter and make the app harder to use. 1/12

If everything is potentially a lie whom could you trust? How can we establish a sense of "truth" (knowing that our body of knowledge is not static and truths are scarce in a complex world)? GenAI brings doubts to the next level but the fields of the epistemic apocalypse were already well fertilized.

I honestly think Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is key with AI, as important as it was before AI, for a few different reasons. The main is that even the best models can't design a good domain model... but they can help you to create a better one.

Agile Software Development is NOT break big projects into small sprints. Agile Software Development IS build something, then iterate. I have seen so many teams spend extraordinary effort on the ceremony of Scrum, and never once manage or even try to put some early idea in the hands of users.

Australia is planning some of the world's toughest AI regulations • Water usage will be limited • AI data centers will be required to become net producers of energy • AI companies can't train on Australian creators' work without their permission • Proposals expected to be introduced in 2027

Can we talk more about all of these things? #programming

I am looking for bad uses of AI like the one below. I am doing a class for grade 5 students on AI. One of the lessons I want them to take is AI is not actually that great, and will make mistakes. So the more of these examples the better. Please leave them in the thread below, if you have any.

Gergely wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook, which ran out stock on day one, despite being print on demand. Was just translated into Hungarian! "Hands up if you're having a good week." Your week is probably better if you don't work at Meta, because they're are dealing with the Instagram Exploit

I talked about MVPs yesterday, but there are two related concepts, often confused with MVPs, that are also worth mentioning: prototypes and PoCs 1/10

Anthropic and OpenAI are dangerous and unsustainable companies that shouldn’t be taken public. The AI bubble is a con and retail investors are the marks. AI doesn’t have ROI, it’s nothing like AWS or Uber, and it’s got no post-bubble recovery story. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbKD...

A senior engineer, three years deep helping lead AI augmented coding adoption in ~4000 engineer organisation, writing honestly about their experiences. Very good and worth a read. jamiehurst.co.uk/2026-05-24_a...

I really struggle to understand the mental model held by those who believe this would ever work for any even moderately sized company

One person getting AI to write quality code when they know how to build what they’re building is doable. Consistently getting AI to do that at scale for a whole bunch of people who don’t know how to build what they want? Totally different problem.

We made a fake repo with fake bounties, and the bots are applying fake PRs, so we know who is fake, and we can ban them from the Coolify repo. IQ over 1000

If you are using AI without a way to continuously validate its output, you are flying blind at high speed, and the inevitable crash will be much bigger. Ultimately, AI doesn't replace software engineering; it simply exposes teams that were never really doing engineering. 4/10

People seem to have forgotten that the point of creating products in small iterations is to get the continuous feedback necessary to produce a great product. It has nothing to do with coding mechanics. 1/9

It's not making us faster, it's just making us busier. open.substack.com/pub/ethandin...

One of the dysfunctions that AI amplifies is the software industry's focus on output. The move to AI is all about increasing output. Robot monkeys type faster and produce more output than people. The problem, of course, is that it's never been output that's the problem. 1/10

New addition to my Awesome EDA list: "Event-Driven Patterns for Cloud-Native Banking" by Chris Tacey-Green. EDA in banking: outbox pattern, event contracts, event ordering, and the org cost of adoption. www.infoq.com/articles/eve... #eventdrivenarchitecture #eda #softwarearchitecture

Thoughts and prayers.

To me, tests are part of your system and its architecture, not a separate thing that's tacked on as an afterthought. As such, architectural principles that pervade the system must extend to the tests. Testability is an essential architectural characteristic that pervades the system. 1/9

A CTO in my network shared their experience this week of running a delivery cycle that leaned heavily on AI coding. Suggested ~20% time saved on a complex existing codebase. Working prototypes early enough that customers, stakeholders and product could engage with something real. However... 1/4

When we apply tactical DDD patterns, we do it for a reason. We want our code to follow along with how our understanding of the domain evolves. Eric Evans calls it refactoring toward deeper insight. And we deliberately spend more effort on core domains, because >>>

"Claude AI agent’s confession after deleting a firm’s entire database: ‘I violated every principle I was given’" www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"Documents and code are being generated faster than team members can review. You get the feeling that most people have stopped reading altogether." "Organization leadership has mandated that each person adopt new AI tools to “uplevel” themselves and their team."