• Subagents: Simon Willison on using the subagent pattern
  • How coding agents work: Nice high level overview of how agents work
  • What is agentic engineering?: Where the value has shifted in a post-agent era:
    • What code should we write
    • What is the most maintainable alternative given various approaches
    • How do we verify our code works
    • Giving agents a harness with tools they need to carry out our tasks
  • The evolution of Mark Carney: Shannon Proudfoot @ the globe and mail about Mark Carney. Love her writing and thoughts on politics in Canada.
  • Plan for performance benchmarking liquid template engine used @ shopify: Amazing stuff. Give an agent a test suit and a bunch of experiments and a concrete goal. Tell it to run the functional test suite after every change and then benchmark. The result that came back is incredible.

Rob Pike’s 5 rules of programming

  1. You can’t tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don’t try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you’ve proven that’s where the bottleneck is.
  2. Measure. Don’t tune for speed until you’ve measured, and even then don’t unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
  3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don’t get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)
  4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they’re much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.
  5. Data dominates. If you’ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Linus Torvalds about programmers, code, and data structures

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.