Principal-Agent-Problems on Andrew Quinn's TILs

The long death of programming languages

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote my first Clojure program in anger a few months ago. Only, it’s not accurate to say that I wrote it; AI did most of the writing, and I directed it on what my design goals were and why. Architecturally, you could call it was a stateless anti-corruption layer, yapping between some REST endpoints and some ancient proprietary serialization.

I had never written a Clojure program of nontrivial size before. Indeed I had barely touched any Lisp at all since working through SICP during a high school summer vacation, over a decade ago. That didn’t matter. Much more important was emphasizing certain invariants from the start, like the aforementioned statelessness, which made it very easy to unit and integration test, which was the true challenge.

"Courage to quit" matters more for seniors, less for juniors

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As a teenager first getting into computers in the late 2000s I spent a lot of time reading old revered tomes like ESR’s The Art of Unix Programming and SICP . If present-day me were to isekai back in time and lose all of the technical knowledge I had but retain my current instincts, however, I would have left all of this on the table and just built a terrible new automation tool for the surprisingly scriptable MMORPG I was into in PHP 5, with as much disregard for clean code and security practices that I could muster[^1]. Then I would have put that tool online, continued to add new features to the ball of mud, and kept it running for 5-10 years before my first post-college interview. And then the vibe that would come across is less “He’s an egghead, and we like that, but we really need someone who actually does things” and more “He’s a meathead, but inside of that meathead is an egghead waiting to be revealed. We need this kind of junior dev yesterday.” I would have done this even though an objectively far superior tool had already existed for quite some time, making this project “feel like” dead weight in the wide world of software! But why?

Consider the cronslave

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As a nerdy, working-class kid who grew up in the 1990s, knowing what time it actually was was a luxury I rarely had access to before I was 12 or so and my parents finally got an Internet connection with its attendant link to the Network Time Protocol. If you had told me I could have not just a watch but an entire machine that

Never lost the time,
Did what I wanted, how I wanted it, and
Could be programmed to do what I want, how I want it on a schedule,

I would have had to substantially revise my Christmas wishlist.

Vibe coding and complementary goods

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Peanut butter and jelly are complementary goods, as are cars and gasoline, newer cars and electricity, electricity and basically everything else.

We don’t normally think of, say, Docker and Kubernetes as complementary goods in software engineering, because you can get both for the low price of free. Or can you? You still have to invest time in learning both, and as the famous saying goes…

Say it takes X hours to learn Docker adequately. If Docker suddenly becomes easier to learn, such that it now takes only X / 2 hours, it’s reasonable to assume Kubernetes will become more popular in tandem, because one of its complements now costs less and is hence supplied in greater quantities anyway. You don’t want a peanut butter only sandwich, do you?

Enforce GPL compliance by offering bounties?

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Epistemic status: Very unclear, also I Am Not A Lawyer This Is Not Legal Advice Get Off My Lawn

(N.B.: I"m using “GPL” with broad strokes here, to point at “open source licenses it’s straightforward to run afoul of”.)

Policing is always hard in a world of limited resources. Especially when one is targeting sophisticated, well-monied criminal organizations, it can take an awful lot of time and effort merely to credibly reveal that wrongdoing has taken place. Would it surprise you if I said the average criminal software organization is probably, on the margin, more sophisticated than the average criminal organization? If so, you should probably expect that the former’s crimes are brought to life even less often than the latter’s.

OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a well-guarded id_ed25519.pub in case you end up in hot water during the (long - very long, stable cash flow for generations long) maintenance contract, and you’re in the ballpark.

Disable your browser history to write better internal docs

Tue, 14 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Most of us work in companies with something approximating a shared online internal wiki, be it Confluence or MediaWiki or even a searchable, static website custom built for the task.

A common problem with these sites is making what you write discoverable to other people on the site. Your chosen title might tell you, a person fully in the weeds of whatever you were just doing, exactly enough to know this is the article you were looking for. Another human being, who might be searching for help on how to do this for the first time? Not so much.