I’ve been managing engineering teams for a while now. One perennial challenge is the constant context switching. Paul Graham wasn’t kidding about the reality of manager schedules, and I spend all day bouncing between wildly different meetings. It’s a lot of little things to keep in working memory. If I don’t write it down, it disappears. Of course, if I do write it down it may still fall into the /dev/null of my Obsidian notebook. ...
When I started at Parse.ly, Python was our language of choice. It was fast to write and easy to read. It fit our brains well and it’s juuuust performant enough for a realtime analytics system. The choice was explicit: prioritize developer time and happiness over machine time and cost. ChatGPT and Github Copilot are upending that calculus. Over the next few years, developer unfriendly languages will become more appealing because LLMs will paper over the unpleasantness of actually writing code in them. The ergonomics and aesthetics of a language will take a backseat to performance, ease of deployment, and other concerns. ...