The Linux kernel has had a written rule about commit hygiene since before the platforms most engineers use today existed. "Separate each logical change into a separate patch." The rule is currently being violated at an industrial scale by everyone using LLM assistants to write code, because the assistants produce sprawling multi-concern diffs by default. The kernel's discipline is the cleanest answer to the resulting mess, and it scales down to any project size.
tag: #llm
2 posts
Big tech has discovered a new way to measure engineering productivity. The metric is the number of AI tokens an engineer consumes per month. It rewards the exact opposite of competent engineering, and the engineers who understand this are being systematically ranked beneath the engineers who do not.