Jessitron

When individualism worked

There was a moment when individualism was compatible with human identity formation, a golden age when our lifetime and the pace of social change coincided.

Who are we Now?

This is based on my keynote at RubyConf 2026. Video, references There’s a philosopher in Naples, Italy, way back in the 1700s who understood something important to software today. Giambattista Vico lived early in the Enlightenment, when mathematical and experimental thinking…

Symmathesy and AI with Kent Beck

Verum Factum and the Creator’s Confidence

Verum Factum: we only really know what we made. Dang, I know that feeling with software! And I miss it, now that AI is doing the coding. But sometimes I still get it...

What is it like to be you?

This is what I want to know when I get to know someone. What is the experience of being alive in your body, in your world? This is the definition of consciousness: there is something it is like to be you. Erik Hoel contrasts this with LLMs, speculating there is nothing it is…

Span or Attribute? in OpenTelemetry custom instrumentation

Instead of emitting a log, add attributes to the current span. OpenTelemetry makes this easy, and Honeycomb makes it free. This gets you more data correlation.

Communication is hard, but sometimes I can fix it.

When coding with an agent gets tricky, use the agent to make it less tricky.

Adding Correctness Conditions to Code Changes

Today I looked at the first PR on our new project repo. It added a new run script, but the README didn’t mention it. The proposed change was incomplete, because the documentation was out of sync. Did I comment on the PR? heck no. I want to fix this problem for all PRs, not just…

Working with AI: Do Things Right

Today, a quick example of introducing determinism when an AI struggles. I give it a simple instruction, it screws it up, I tell it to write a program to do things right.

Working with AI: How does it Know?

Is the AI going to do what I want?