A carefully curated collection of fascinating discoveries, thought-provoking ideas, and hidden gems from around the web. This week featuring AI criticism, insights into Palantir, among other things.
AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers by Namanyay Goel
This post resonated with me a lot. As I’ve written in previous episodes, I tried the new Windsurf AI editor from Codeium. It was fascinating to see results so fast, but: I did not understand my codebase. I did not try to find solutions to bugs for myself, I just prompted. Then I inserted AI’s solution and tried to run the code. If it did not run, I just prompted again.
This exact scenario is described by Namanyay Goel in this post. He described the state as becoming “a human clipboard, a mere intermediary between my code and an LLM.”
As a solution he suggests e.g. AI-free days, where you should try and solve every problem for yourself to keep a connection to your code.
My key takeaway: I’m glad someone described the feeling I had when using an AI editor. I try to pick dedicated problems and solve them without AI at first, to deepen my knowledge of the code I produce.
Reflections on Palantir by Nabeel Qureshi
As a very controversial company, I was never quite sure what Palantir actually did.
This essay by Nabeel Qureshi discusses many perspectives on Palantir that Qureshi gained as an employee there.
I found the choice of books that every employee was given upon starting at Palantir quite interesting (“when you joined they sent you a copy of Impro, Looming Tower (9/11 book), Interviewing Users, and Getting Things Done“).
Also the type of code created by Palantir (“code that gets the job done fast, which usually means – politely – technical debt and hacky workarounds”) which worked and suprised the customer as they “had hilariously low expectations of most software contractors, who were typically implementors of SAP or other software like that, and worked on years-long ‘waterfall’ style timescales. So when a ragtag team of 20-something kids showed up to the customer site and built real software that people could use within a week or two, people noticed.”
My key takeaway: I am going to order the book Impro, which sounds very promising, even though it is a book about theatre acting. I think it can be useful in everyday working life.
Make Web 1.0 Great Again! – Hypermedia Systems by Gross, Stepinski, & Akşimşek by Book Overflow
I particularly like the Book Overflow podcast. Each episode covers another book which is somewhat related to programming.
In this episode, they talked about HTMX and other hypermedia systems. I never got around to looking at HTMX as a replacement for JavaScript-based frameworks, so listening to this was really enlightening.
They went into the basics of Web 1.0 and the benefits of using hypermedia systems.
My key takeaway: Before I test yet another new JS framework, I am going to look at HTMX and try if it maybe covers all of the needs I have for a certain use case. It sounds very promising.
Modern Books for Software Engineering Managers by Alexey Yuzhakov
I have one big problem: I love to read book recommendation posts. This in itself is not a real problem, but they keep filling my to-read list in a way I can never tackle in this life (maybe if you can someday add content via a brain-interface directly into your brain, but that seems far away).
Normally, those recommendation posts are filled with the same books over and over again. This one stood out in my opinion, as I’ve seen some books I’ve never heard before.
My key takeaway: As I’m currently reading the book Radical Candor, I think my next management-style book will be Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager and I will order this one soon (or maybe not *glancing at the large stack of books behind me*).
Thanks for joining me on this week’s journey of Stuff Worth Sharing! I hope you found something intriguing to explore further.
Feel free to share with others who might enjoy these weekly finds.
Until next week,
Flo
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