NYT headline: “Is Claude Conscious?”
Me: Is the NYT editorial board conscious?
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Matt Weagle
@mweagle@hachyderm.io
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Joined November 06, 2022
“The Standard-Setter also tends to hallucinate that they have somehow figured out how to motivate *everyone* with their approach, missing that a lot of people don’t respond to pressure, exhortation, or someone else’s intensity. They respond to clarity, trust, autonomy, meaning, mastery, good feedback, and the feeling that their effort is actually connected to something worthwhile.”
https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-443-the-standard-setter
“In my opinion AWS has never been great at helping people actually do serverless. They’re excellent at the individual building blocks: functions, queues, databases. Wiring it together, getting IAM right, deploying it, knowing what you built once it’s running? That’s on you. It was clunky when I started, and it’s still clunky now.”
https://danielleheberling.xyz/blog/pour-one-out-for-infrastructure-composer/
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“The report attributes the incident to two errors:
1. correctly following an incorrect procedure
2. incorrectly following a correct procedure”
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/10/02/there-was-a-light-that-never-went-out/
This is already the case:
“Traditional product development approaches will not advance pre-AI tools enough to support people in the future.”
https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/2026/10/02/the-substitution-myth-the-tough-spot-it-puts-us-in/
“Everybody wants instant oatmeal.
It doesn't work that way.”
- LeBron James
Chief Transformation Officer
Ultimately the person liable for the factory output is the leader. The creation of double-binds (“go faster” and “own quality”) for people doing the work systematically omits the organization. NASA, Boeing, and GE are all cautionary tales.
“so that someone is still on the hook for what happens, and you’re being very explicit about how you think about those things.”
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/human-judgment-doesnt-leave-the-software-factory-it-relocates/
Some do.
“Maximizing the utility of a rational actor or a general population is an appealing philosophical goal, but the precise rational calculations are always made about fantasy stories. Economists know this, and proceed with caution.”
“But, and this is my central thesis for this blog post, the user experience as someone who just wants to compile some code and run some tests is terrible. Here’s ten reasons why.”
https://blog.appliedcomputing.io/p/bazels-ux-is-really-really-really
Shout out to me for keeping my inner voice inside.
This doc provides helpful mental models and points of intervention that are AI-topical, but largely AI-independent.
“The disciplines that enable a team to deliver secure, reliable changes quickly are the same ones required to absorb agent-generated work safely.”
https://itrevolution.com/product/when-coding-is-free/
“Some of these predictions are just observations, they’ve long been true at companies like Amp. Others will take some time to play out.”
https://thorstenball.com/blog/2026/09/19/what-i-believe-about-the-future-of-software-development/
“I sat in all of those exit conversations thinking I’d hear something different each time, such as a better job offer, a life change, or something I could file away as circumstance. However, all three said a version of the same thing. One of them put it plainly:
“I cannot handle this pressure of making things right without any credit for it.””
https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-productivity-is-burning-out-your-best-engineers
“The single clearest strategic warning from the conference, repeated in different words
across security, governance and regulated-industry sessions: agentic AI amplifies
discipline and habits — positive or negative — that already exist in an organization.
Teams and organizations with weak testing culture, unclear risk ownership or poor
documentation hygiene will get worse, faster, not better.”
https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/documents/report/tw_future_of_software_engineering_europe_2026.pdf
Two quotes that I'm reminded of reading testimonials about AI-fueled increases in code volume without regard to outcomes:
Drucker: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently something that should not have been done at all"
Deming: "A bad system will beat a good person every time"
“This is what I call the Resilience Amnesia Cycle. It is a predictable pattern where organizations systematically forget why they invested in prevention, precisely because that prevention worked.”
https://newsletter.resiliumlabs.com/p/the-prevention-paradox
Flying Blind is an excellent book about the rapid erosion of the engineering culture that sustained Boeing for decades. One of the tangible examples they highlighted was that teams were rewarded for assembly line velocity and individuals who called out quality issues were targeted.
https://www.museumofflightstore.org/flying-blind-the-737-max-tragedy.html
Columbia Gorge in the Spring. #bloomscrolling
“A nuclear weapons program lost the ability to make a material it invented. The knowledge existed only in people, and the people were gone.”
https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-things
The problem is that the organization didn’t create an environment where those departed people chose to stay and were rewarded for mentoring the next generation. What is the average job tenure for new entrants? Do they see huge comp bumps for “understanding” or for dive-and-save offers?
“The problem is that nobody left remembers why the batch job must run in that exact order on the last business day of the month. What died was not the language. It was the context. The decisions. The scar tissue.”
https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/07/07/ai-native-developers-gatekeeper-generation/
On chapter two and already have neck muscle soreness from vigorously and frequently agreeing with Mik. I’ll have to switch up my response for the rest of the book.
https://itrevolution.com/product/output-to-outcome/
Replying to
@adrianco@mastodon.social Yes. Also measuring unplanned time allocated to keeping the system from more catastrophic failures. “What’s happening when nothing is happening” is that people are keeping it operational, often at the expense of declared commitments.
I am not the first, and I know I won't be the last person to make this observation, but code at rest has absolutely no value. The only benefit to code is the effect it produces. There is no functional difference between no code and code that doesn't work.
There's the product adage "people don't want a drill, they want a hole". When I reach for a drill, I expect it to work. If it doesn't, I now add the problem of how to responsibly dispose of my oddly-shaped paperweight to my original problem of wanting a hole.
This is true for all types of organizational communication. It’s especially critical if that communication is likely to affect delivery timelines.
“The real power lies in having a shared language at the company, not in the table’s definitions.”
https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/growth/code-yellow-code-red/
JIRA: not a fan
"Every manufacturer optimizes for margin; the distinction lies in which variables are treated as fixed and which are allowed to move. Brands like Häagen-Dazs appear to treat ingredient integrity and sensory appeal as hard constraints. Others have treated those variables as adjustable, relying on incremental changes that remain below the threshold of consumer detection. One approach preserves product identity and adjusts price transparently. The other is optimization by dilution."
https://medium.com/@dapscience/the-encrapification-of-store-bought-ice-cream-2da2d58ee0b9
""I wish I had kept the message the CTO sent me. It approximately read, “Stop all releases immediately. If we can’t keep the service up, we shouldn’t be checking in any code.””
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/sometimes-your-job-is-to-get-in-the-way
“Jevons paradox applies to software. When the cost of producing software collapses, demand explodes. Internal tools that were never worth building get built. Bespoke apps for teams of six get built. The demand has no ceiling I can see.”
https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/04/18/engineering-age-ending-ai-software-future/
“Much better is: Would you learn from this person? Would others at the company learn? In my experience this is not only true of every great executive, but it’s so clearly true that you can tell from the interview.”
https://longform.asmartbear.com/hire-better-than-you/
Replying to
@jeffmcneill@hachyderm.io Yep. Herd immunity works when the herd follows the protocol and the protocol administrators are funded.
“The actual path to seniority isn’t learning more tools and patterns, but learning when not to use them. Anyone can add complexity. It takes experience and confidence to leave it out.”
https://terriblesoftware.org/2026/03/03/nobody-gets-promoted-for-simplicity/
Today is a day when I need to follow my own "go for a walk" advice.
“Doing it better would be easy. Simply taking a little step back, thinking for a moment instead of just running after someone else’s goal, and adding a tiny bit of empathy to the interaction with our peers would make things a lot better. Instead of running after every “groundbreaking innovation of the day”, we could ask ourselves what we actually need and then ponder how AI can support us best in achieving these goals.”
https://www.ufried.com/blog/worst_enemies/
Many want to plant.
Fewer want to weed.
"The model appears optimistic, which is enough to make the whole thing sound temporarily reasonable. Each addition looks manageable in isolation. That is how the Kraken works. It does not attack all at once."
"The whole industry is caught in this loop now. You need the fear to justify the funding. You need the funding to build the thing. The thing then justifies more fear. Try telling the story in plain, simple language.”
https://om.co/2026/04/16/eat-your-words/?__readwiseLocation=
“The lesson is what it took to make that learning happen: a catastrophic, public, entirely avoidable disaster, witnessed by thousands. Jacobsson already knew what needed to change. He simply hadn’t felt able to say so with sufficient authority until the failure was so large and so visible that a change of approach was essential.”
https://psychsafety.com/the-vasa-disaster/
"But distributed bugs don’t respect ceremony. They show up after retries, batching, and unlucky orderings nobody pictured when the code was written. They can sleep in stored state for months and then wake up on a Tuesday afternoon. LLMs are excellent at happy paths; the corners of distributed behavior are not happy places.
We’re about to try and automate the hardest part of our craft."
"I’m using this enormously complex system, an LLM, to help me solve a problem that was created by software complexity in the first place."
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/31/ashby-taught-us-we-have-to-fight-fire-with-fire
"The researchers call this the offloading paradox. Offloading can lead to better quality thinking and deeper learning — but only under two conditions..."
https://drphilippahardman.substack.com/p/the-cognitive-offloading-paradox
Replying to
@davemangot Yeah - it's a great article. Thank you Pete!
There's been a lot of technological change in 400 years, but power gradients, sunk cost, and production pressure persist.
Replying to
@brianleroux Moral support: "The other thing I have come to realize is how much of a productivity loss flaky tests can yield in a large SW project: the entire enterprise slows down as engineers fight with CI. Thus, de-flaking tests is one of the most beneficial things a project can invest in."
http://www.twtext.com.cdn.cloudflare.net/article/1291899271885623296
I don’t know who sent this unsolicited SMS text, but I am positive it is not from James Talarico.
“Let's start with the obvious one: if you don't know how to represent your property as a logical formula, then TLA+ can't help you. Nor can any formal method.”
https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/what-tla-can-and-cant-check/
Using an LLM to understand JIRAs implicit domain model and hidden constraints. AMA.
“Before we talk about the staff engineering manager, we need to take a step back and understand how people move up the management ladder. “
https://leaddev.com/hiring/what-staff-engineering-manager-and-how-can-you-become-one
Mik's new book will be released on July 14, 2026 & I'm confident it will be a must read.
"In a world of abundant knowledge production, becoming AI native means shifting our organizations’ operating model and our professional focus from building outputs to delivering outcomes."
https://itrevolution.com/articles/sneak-peek-at-mik-kerstens-new-book-output-to-outcome
"On one hand, I think it’s absolutely incredible to think that users with all kinds of different disabilities could create their own assistive technology by describing to AI what they need."
“The question ultimately isn’t whether agents and tooling to support them will have a market. It is rather whether that will come at the expense of, or in addition to, markets for human developers.”
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/09/16/new-new-kingmakers/
