.NET
Null is Changing AGAIN in C# and it’s Awesome!
The null conditional operator (?.) now works with assignment (e.g., customer?.Age = newAge only makes the assignment if customer is not null.
AI
AWS re:Invent 2024 – How Principal Financial improved productivity with Amazon Q Business
This presentation (44 mins) provides background on the Amazon Q Business platform launched in Apr 2024. Principal Financial — an insurance, benefits, retirement, pension, and global asset management company — uses Amazon Q Business to empower employees and customers as they navigate a very complex (and highly regulated) set of tasks. It’s an excellent case study of what the problems were, what worked, what didn’t, and how they got where they are using AWS technologies.
Gumroad CEO’s playbook to 40x his team’s productivity with v0, Cursor, and Devin | Sahil Lavingia
- This video demonstrates how Sahil uses v0 (an AI powered UI generation tool for prototyping), Devin (an AI software developer), and Cursor (an AI powered IDE) to shorten the feedback loop of shipping software. Shadcn UI (UI component library for React apps that uses RadixUI for accessibility and Tailwind for styling) is also another tool mentioned.
- Workflow: Do UI prototyping via a prompt (and/or image upload) in v0. Share v0’s output link with Devin (which has access to your repositories) which then submits a pull request. If things aren’t quite right, use Cursor to continue working on the branch created by Devin.
- 40x in this case means something that used to take 2 weeks from inception to delivery now takes 2 hours.
- Engineers can be used to help clean up tech debt so designers can ship features. Sahil also believes humans are still needed for research and interacting with other people.
- (Based on my research via ChatGPT, each vendor states that the users own the generated output and that you can opt out of the tools using input or output for training.)
- Questions I have… (1) What if these tools no longer become separate entities because they’ve been acquired by other tech giants (thinking GitHub Copilot here) who do things on different terms? (2) How much do these tools cost? (The websites are rather vague.)
Master Test-Driven Development with GitHub Copilot
This is a simple example of using Copilot Chat to do TDD. It needs a bit of polish — the prompts could be more specific and could take advantage of specifying files (e.g., #ValidatorTests.cs instead of asking it to look at the test code generated above), and there was no demonstration of the “refactor” step (which could be handled by something like refactor #Validator.cs to be more concise. Another way of doing TDD with Copilot is via code completion where you write what you want help with in comments and let the auto-complete feature do its work.
AI Is Making You Dumber. Here’s Why
- Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation
- David Raffo noticed his students’ writing got dramatically better, but not their writing skills. Students that skipped basic learning skills carried this habit into their jobs.
- Dr. Ann Mckee (Alzheimer’s researcher) stated that staying cognitively active and in control is important to prevent or slow dementia.
- Cognitive offloading — people relying on technology for problem-solving and decision-making rather than engaging in independent critical thinking
- AI for facial recognition led to the arrest of the wrong person (link)
- People trust AI because it makes things easier and more convenient.
- People surrender their agency to algorithms; we don’t ask ourselves what we want when we have the algorithms do that for us. See algorithmic complacency.
- AI is a good time saver for simple, repetitive tasks where it’s very unlikely to make mistakes.
- In the knowledge age if that knowledge is flawed and most people can’t tell, our grasp on reality slips. Trust is compromised. People assume the answers are facts and share it elsewhere, which can then be used for further training (assuming whatever is shared frequently must be true). AI assistants get things wrong.
- Model collapse — AI using its own output as input for training. For example, 57% of the internet may already be AI sludge.
- Dead Internet theory — vast amount of the Internet has been replaced by bots and AI
- Geoff Hinton (godfather of AI) stated that a general purpose LLM does not have consistent world view, which is necessary to act in the world.
- “It’s making our lives easier; what’s the harm? It’s what humans have always done. And if we’re given the chance to let our minds rest, we’ll often take it — no matter the cost.”
- Gen Z in particular is more likely to use AI to do work. The risk is that people will be over-reliant on these tools and their creativity will begin to atrophy.
- The solution is to think of AI as a companion, rather than doing the thinking for you. Any answers should be considered carefully.
- Dr. Thomas Deitterich said that we mistake LLMs as knowledge bases, when in reality they are statistical models of knowledge bases.
Coaching
Technical Coaching with the Samman Method
This 45-min talk establishes the connection between XP practices such as TDD and ensemble (mob) programming and lower technical debt. The Samman method (pronounced sah-mahn, Swedish for together) combines learning hours and ensemble work. With defined roles and facilitation via a technical coach, teams can learn how to build muscle memory for good software development.
Culture
The case for making art when the world is on fire | Amie McNee
- We’re living in a culture that sidelines the creative act (something for children or the retired). It’s indulgent, frivolous, and selfish.
- Art — anything we do to create something with the intention to connect
- Authors and artists can doubt their impact on the world. Creativity isn’t considered productive. “There are bigger things happening in the world. How could I be playing the piano…when there is so much pain in the world?”
- Creativity is the missing pillar of self-development. As a culture we’re obsessed with productivity and optimizing to be our best ourselves. Here’s a study about making art for 45 minutes reducing cortisol levels.
- Making art gives you agency in a world where we have little control. Creativity is our power to enact change. Artists bring order to the chaos.
- We’re experiencing an epidemic of meaninglessness, where we lack agency to do anything to affect hard global problems. Because things seem hopeless, we move laterally to other things to fill the void (phone addition, social media, etc.).
- In a society that profits from you being stuck on your phone, giving your attention to art is a rebellious act.
- We are culture of consumption and we’ve forgotten how to make.
- Culture is moved by art. We’re impacted on a human level.
- Common topic: What’s the point in making art when AI can do it better and cheaper? We need humans making things to help people feel closer to humanity.
- Artists dare to imagine a different world. Creatives never leave the world the way they found it.
GitHub Copilot
About customizing GitHub Copilot Chat responses
This article shows how you can configure a repository to have custom rules about how Copilot Chat should respond via prompt files. Use cases for instructions: test generation, code review, commit message generation, tools the repo uses, code generation, domain expertise, team collaboration style, onboarding, best practices.
Skill acquisition
Why Some Developers Advance Faster – How Coding Skill Acquisition Happens
This (15 min) video describes Hartman’s proficiency taxonomy — a set of steps you go through to learn things — as it applies to learning software development skills. It explains each phase and how to get to the next one. The key takeaway is that it’s faster to become proficient when doing things as a team, or if you have a dedicated technical coach.