Matt Wynne

Matt Wynne

@mattwynne.net

Simplist

1.5K followers441 following288 posts

Context engineering is hard, and we’re all making it up as we go. Record Augmented Development (RAD) puts your project on rails: agents follow agreed decisions and bring conflicts back to you. Free lesson, Fri 23 Oct: leansoftware.ai/go/4hsvyz

Use cases are old and unfashionable. They’re also really useful. An actor, a goal, a main scenario and its extensions give coding agents something concrete to work from. Free lesson, Fri 23 Oct, 9am PT / noon ET: leansoftware.ai/go/4hsvyz

A user workflow takes precedence over an architectural decision. Record-driven development connects user goals to feature behaviour, then technical decisions, governed by vision and vocabulary. Free lesson, 23 Oct: leansoftware.ai/go/4hsvyz

ADRs were awesome with humans, they're even more awesome with agents. We make decisions about much more than architecture. Record-driven development extends that discipline. Free lesson: 23 Oct, 9am PT / noon ET. leansoftware.ai/go/4hsvyz

Writing software is a continual process of decision-making. Your coding agent needs the reasoning behind those decisions, not just the code. Our free lesson on record-driven development: 23 Oct, 9am Pacific / noon Eastern. leansoftware.ai/go/4hsvyz

I can't shake this thought that we're "coding past each other" - everyone building stuff with their sirens, but not spending enough time integrating other people's ideas.

An agent says it found a bug. Can you reproduce it? A failing test gives the next person something concrete to work from. What do you do with findings that don’t reproduce? Bring your questions to Thursday’s free agentic coding clinic: leansoftware.ai/go/lean-coff...

I’ve paired with people for over 20 years. I’ve learnt so much from seeing how someone else thinks. At Thursday’s clinic, you pick the questions. I want to hear how you think about coding agents and what you’ve tried. Join us: leansoftware.ai/go/lean-coff...

Coding with an LLM can be lonely. I can build all day. Who knows what I’ve done? Who can challenge me if I miss something the agent can’t see? Join our free agentic coding clinic Thursday and meet some other humans! Bring your questions: leansoftware.ai/go/lean-coff...

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Non-profits and government agencies who can’t afford the tokens and get stuck with shitty software, left further and further behind.

I think people have a right to be angry about this. I'm angry about this. At the same time, I've been working in software for over 25 years at this point, and I can't remember the last time I was this excited by a technology and what it can do.

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LLMs not only amplify social injustice through the inherent bias of the material they were trained on, they also move even more wealth and power towards an ever smaller number of people who can access and harness this technology.

If you can afford the tokens, you get access to the productivity gains, you learn the skills. Developers who can’t afford a personal Claude Max subscription, who aren’t playing and learning in their spare time are feeling left behind.

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I can probably produce five, maybe ten times as much value in a day as I could a year ago, but is anyone going to pay me 5x my salary? I doubt it. We're all running to stand still. Thanks capitalism.

I know a lot of people in the software engineering community right now who are, at best, begrudgingly accepting that LLMs are here to stay and, at worst, very angry about the whole thing.

As someone who has built their career around creating high-quality software, and as recently as 18 months ago was basically burying their head in the sand hoping it would all go away, I think I understand this perspective.

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Anthropomorphizing them is problematic in many ways. So a metaphor where I literally refer to the LLMs as "machines" working in an "assembly line" is vastly preferable to one where I talk about agents or hallucinations.

One of the thinking errors that it's so easy to get drawn into when working with LLMs is that they're somehow sentient. It's just not true. They're machines.

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Even when configured for "concise" output it still talks a lot, in comparison to the GPT models which are much more focussed on the facts.

I've heard people describe Gemini as having "drunk hands" and have learned not to let it touch the code, but it often seems to be the best at seeing things the other models don't see - holes in my plans, ideas I haven't considered.

Jumping between Anthropic and OpenAI's models, I am increasingly irritated by the Anthropic models' propensity to invent short-hand terms for things (I call these "slop words") that I have never used and have no idea what they mean. e.g. "the spine"

AI summaries are lame. A summary of a book is not the same thing as learning it. Let's be honest, you never read the summary of a meeting you missed unless you absolutely have to.

They’re boring. Reading is not the same as learning. The interesting thing about an agent is that it can be a study partner. It can ask you questions, listen while you explain it back, and show you where you have misunderstood.

The danger of course is that they do sloppy work, and you end up doing unpleasant labour cleaning up their mess. But it doesn't have to be this way. You can learn to get great results from models, by giving them the right context and harnessing them with validation loops.

This was based on his mantra, to constantly ask yourself: > Why am I doing this? (implied: the model should be doing this instead) The basic idea is that labour is gravity, and the more you can get agents to work for you, the lighter you become.

This is no different to other task automation activities we've done in the past - write a script to do some repetitive piece of work - but those scripts can now get the superpowers of the models.