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What New Developers Need to Know About Working with AI

It’s been a few years since I wrote Letters to a New Developer, about what I wish I’d known when I was starting out. The industry has changed with the advent and acceleration of generative AI and the implications of these tools on coding and software creation.

So I wanted to write a quick update to give advice to developers who are entering this world with AI.

It’s important to understand what developers actually do.

They are not responsible for writing code. They are not responsible for liking technology.

Like other employees, developers are responsible for  taking their particular skill set and using it to solve problems that a business or organization needs solved. Whether that’s a one-person shop organizing their customers’ data or a large organization like Walmart, Amazon or the US military trying to improve their logistics, there are goals to achieve. For a developer building, maintaining and improving software is the main means to achieve those goals.

This does not change in the world of AI.

The role of a developer is still to understand technology, how it can be applied, where its limits are and to build it with the quality and appropriate flexibility for the business situation.

What do I mean by the last part? If you’re building a script to transfer data from one system to another one time, then a throwaway script that doesn’t have error checking, that doesn’t have proper variable names, that doesn’t have abstraction is appropriate. If, on the other hand, you’re creating foundational architectural components of a long-lived system, you need to think about all the things that make software more maintainable.

In either case as a developer your role is clear. It’s not to code the software. It’s to take the business requirements, understand the domain and build a solution that meets the business’s requirements for a given level of flexibility, complexity and completeness.

That job doesn’t change whether you’re using:

  •  machine code assembly
  • a non-memory managed language like C
  • a memory managed language like Java or
  • spec-driven development.

As a dev, your job is to understand the technical trade-offs, use the right tools and meet the business or organization’s needs.

Now as a new developer, how do you learn to leverage genAI in a way that is going to help your career rather than hurt it? It’s tough out there to get your job as a new dev and ignoring AI is going to make it even tougher.

It’s important that you learn how to use this tool and use it well. But AI as a tool is much more like Google search results than it is like a compiler error. A compiler error is deterministic and will give you the same message each time you compile the code.

The output of an LLM is not deterministic, just as when you search for guidance for building software on Stack Overflow or your team. With these sources of knowledge, you as a developer need to learn judgment. You need to learn when to trust genAI and when not to trust it.

Do this by starting small, asking for links, and checking the output of an AI against other sources. These include other AIs and published documentation. You’re building your sense of judgment and intuition about the system you are improving. Use it to augment your understanding, not replace it.

When an AI hallucinates, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and never touch genAI again. Instead learn to sniff out when an AI is generating garbage and when it is generating helpful code that will accelerate things.

A good course of action is to use AI to generate easily verifiable code where errors are low impact. An example is writing tests with AI, especially unit tests, especially in a statically typed language. It’s very easy to tell if the tests that are written are working or not. Don’t forget to instruct the AI to fully flesh out the tests, you don’t want any “return true” nonsense.

Another example is read-only queries. If you have an understanding of the data you can verify whether or not the SQL the LLM creates gives you the correct answer. Write multiple queries because they are so low effort, and use them to double check answers. If you were looking for a count of a particular set of customers, ask it for multiple different ways, including a count of one particular kind of customer and a count of all customers grouped by type. This lets you see if things match up.

The goal is not trusting blindly but instead using the tool to accelerate delivery of solutions to the problems the business wants you to solve. But you want to do so in a way that is going to give you confidence that the solutions you deliver are real.

By the way, the value of such intuition and judgement is high for all developers.

I think that it’s even more valuable for newer developers.

If you would like to purchase my book, “Letters To a New Developer” for more of this kind of insight, there’s a sale going on right now through the end of the year. You can use this link to buy my book for just $24. (This is a better deal than I get with my author’s discount.)

 

Books GenAI Programming | moore |

When Are You Ready To Write A Technical Book?

This question came up on an HN thread.

My process for any book I’m thinking about writing is:

  • write out 10 titles for blog posts on the topic
  • write 1-2 blog posts (this lets you, in a low risk way, verify you have interest/expertise)
  • add an email list signup at the bottom of the posts
  • do a bit of research to see if someone else has written on the topic (some googling or reddit searching)
  • write the rest of the blog posts

If you can get 10 meaty blog posts, you have the basics of a book. Plus, you’ll know that you are interested in the topic and that you can write. As you wrote those blog posts, you probably had related ideas or areas you wanted to explore.

You’ll also be able to share these blog posts with friends, colleagues and online communities that you may be a part of. You can get feedback on the ideas and the overall topic here.

You can self-publish the book (done that) or use a publisher (done that). The latter will take more time and effort and will require you to fill out a book proposal.

To be honest, even if you are planning to self-publish, doing the hard work of completing a book proposal is useful. Even if you don’t submit it. It forces you to think about:

  • who is my audience
  • what are my core ideas
  • what else has been written on this topic
  • why is what I’m saying unique
  • why am I the right person to write this book

This can help you narrow in on what will make your book successful and can help with your marketing messaging.

What If you can’t write 10 blog posts about a topic? Then you are missing either:

  • interest in the topic
  • necessary knowledge

But it’s more likely the former. Because you’ll have time to do research to learn. I remember taking something like 4 hours to answer one question about how the Cordova CLI acted in one peculiar edge case. It turned into one sentence in my book.

Finally, if no one else has written anything about the topic (no books, no articles, no social media posts, no nothing) and/or none of your blog posts get any feedback (positive or negative), pick a different topic or expand your vision.

Here’s an exchange I had with Patrick McKenzie in 2013. I wrote:

I had a quick question. I was thinking about writing an ebook for a super niche topic (testing ETL transformations using Pentaho Kettle, an open source ETL tool).

I outlined the book, did some google searching and wrote up a series of blog posts with an email list signup at the bottom.

I got some nice retweets from folks in the Pentaho community and have about 8 people signed up to the list. That was a bit disheartening, but a friend suggested that the folks doing ETL work weren’t exactly developers (perhaps more DBAs or business analysts).

I am still tempted to write the ebook, given my interest in the subject–I think it is a pretty cool tool that I wish would replace lots of data munging scripts, and testing software written using Kettle makes development with it much more fun. On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind some income.

Is this too niche a topic? I’ve been a generalist for most of my career, and if I don’t write this now, in 6 months I probably won’t have the desire or knowledge to do it again (though I might find another software niche to write about by then).

His answer was:

I regret that I have absolutely no knowledge of anything you just said. In general, I might suggest something slightly less niche (you can reasonably suspect to sell 2 copies to 8 people, so unless it is going for $10,000 a copy, might want more volume). You’d still learn a lot publishing it but for the same amount of work why not write on a subject big enough to support 100 or 200 people interested in it?

I could have expanded this topic in several directions:

  • focus on more general ETL testing
  • expand beyond ETL and look at patterns for testing data manipulation
  • focus more on the tool and write a guide to pentaho development, including testing

Or, treat the exploration as an end in itself and not write a book. That’s always a valid outcome of this process of experimentation.

Books Content | moore |

Read “meaty” books

Every so often I read a book that I can’t describe with any other adjective than “meaty”. They’re large, complex and tough to get through. I read them 5-10 pages at a time. They are slow reads (and sometimes I don’t finish them) but they either change my perspective in multiple ways or introduce me to an entirely new perspective.

Some of these books:

  • Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty, which changed my thinking on how capital accumulates and what that means for societies.
  • These Truths by Jill Lepore was a re-examination of the history of the USA from perspectives I hadn’t considered.
  • The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin is a book examining the real world possibilities for space colonization.
  • Refactoring by Martin Fowler exploded my ideas about how to modify software and gave me a new vocabulary too.

The latest book that I’ve read in this category is The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen. This book has totally reworked my understanding of native tribes, political economy of the southwest in the 1700s-1800s, US western expansion, the wealth of Texas, social organization and more.

While it is fun to read books that don’t challenge my thinking, it is also good to read these “meaty” books periodically as well.

Books | moore |

Book Review: The Cuckoo’s Egg

I recently finished “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, by Clifford Stoll. It was a fascinating non-fiction book exploring the foundations of computer security in a personable format.

The setting is the mid 1980s. The author discovers something weird on his academic computer system. There’s an unexplained charge of 75 cents. He digs deeper, discovers that someone who’s left the university is logging in.

After further investigation, he discovers that the user who is logging in is an intruder. After discussing the situation with his boss, he gets three weeks to find out who they are. He figures that’s plenty of time.

The investigation ends up taking a year.

It also extends far beyond his academic systems, both in scope and effort. Stoll talks to numerous government agencies and private organizations, letting them know they’ve been attacked and getting their assistance tracing the hacker. He sleeps under his desk. He rigs up a pager so that he can know which accounts the hacker is using. Stoll sets up printers so that every word the hacker types is recorded, unbeknownst to him.

It’s quite the tale. As someone who has worked with software for years, I really appreciated the historical nature of it. When I became aware of the internet, in my youth, some of the groups and communities he mentions were still around; I remember reading and posting to usenet. But many of the systems were before my time. I’ve never touched a computer running VMS, for instance.

But, for all the history, the people problems were the same: users not changing passwords, system managers not locking their software down, bureaucrats happy to take information but not willing to share. Let’s just say, mistakes were made.

I also enjoyed the author’s interspersal of lived experiences. We don’t simply follow one computer nerd tracking another. We also learn about milkshakes, parties in San Francisco, curry nights and his first experience with the microwave. While some phrases and analogies are repeated (“should we thank someone who goes to a little town and robs people to illustrate they should lock their doors” pops up at least twice), in general the book is pretty readable. Stoll’s personal stories and musings help that readability immensely.

All in all, a great book if you are interested in the history of computing or modern security practices. If you’re interested in learning more, you can check out a paper he wrote based on the same experience for ACM.

Books Mistakes Programming | moore |

Book Review: Algorithms to live by

I finished Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I enjoyed it immensely.

The premise of the book is that computer programs make decisions with algorithms all the time. There’s math behind how they do so, including tradeoffs and time considerations. Human beings face some of the same decisions and there’s no reason we can’t use this knowledge to live better lives.

Yes, this is kind of a self help book—“you can live a better life by thinking like a computer”. But it’s math, folks.

I actually recommended it to my SO because I feel like she’d understand me better after reading it. I’m always talking about how much of the stress in our life is due to resource contention.

The book covers a wide swathe of decision making. Here are some examples of the broad categories and some specific references:

  • when to decide to stop looking for a house or a partner
  • when to explore new knowledge vs exploit current knowledge in the context of clinical trials
  • how randomness can lead to better outcomes
  • how caches can help you determine what of your wardrobe to keep
  • how overfitting warps sports like fencing

As illustrated above, this is not a book about theory, but is actually hands on. I don’t recall seeing a single equation, though there are graphs. And the authors do mention plenty of researcher names, provide footnotes and have a twenty page bibliography. So if you want to learn more about the formal proofs, the info is there.

It’s hard to choose just one takeaway from this book, but if I had to pick one, it’d be the fact that game theory shows that you need external forces to avoid the tragedy of the commons, and that emotions may play a role in providing that.

Here’s an excerpt if you want a deeper look.

If you spend any time thinking about how you can make decisions better, Algorithms to Live By is worth reading.

Books Programming | moore |

Book Review: A Memory Called Empire

I was at a bookstore the other day and was rummaging around for an escape book. I had picked up one book based on staff recommendation, but came across another that had won the Nebula. A Memory Called Empire appeared to be an award winning space opera novel.

I thought, why not, and picked it up. I was not disappointed.

There are two main cultures of different power and viewpoints. The action follows an new, unprepared ambassador from one culture to the other. The cultures are coherent and yet alien. Alien to each other and to me. Competitive poetry, internal reflection, and constant political intrigue define one culture. We get drips and drabs of the other, less powerful civilization, but you learn enough to be appreciative of their scrappyness and reverence for the collective.

The cultures are never described to the detriment of the action. The ambassador is dropped into a political mess and acts and reacts to help save her nation and herself. Whether she is trying to meet powerful people to negotiate for her people, reading correspondence, or escape danger, there’s no downtime. The entire book happens in span of about two weeks.

I also enjoyed the character development. Many of the characters pop in and out of the storyline, but you follow a few main characters for a while. You get to understand and appreciate the way they interact with each other. It doesn’t feel forced at all. At the same time, the “otherness” of the ambassador provides a constant tension which is understandable to anyone who has been dropped into an uncomfortable situation.

The plot revolves around a mystery. But even when it is unveiled, there’s still plenty of excitement, as a confluence of outside, political events ensnare the protagonists.

Some books are so good they keep you reading late into the night. This was one of them.

Books | moore |

Book Review: Am I Being Too Subtle?

I recently finished “Am I Being Too Subtle”, which is a business book by Sam Zell. He is an American businessman and real estate tycoon.

I quite enjoyed the book. We learn a bit about his parents and upbringing, and then he plunges right into the deals. Some of the details are great (he was able to complete a transaction once because he found out the owner of the property had buried a favorite dog in the backyard, and added a clause to the contract allowing the pet to be exhumed). He addresses his successes (helping professionalize the REIT market, selling the equity group, the loyalty of his employees) and his failures (the bankruptcy of the Tribune company in 2008).

The single biggest lesson that I took away was that to succeed you need to be looking in places that others aren’t and that eventually what worked for you will stop working and you’ll need to change. There are other pieces of wisdom in the book, and it’s less than 250 pages. A great fun read if you enjoy learning about business and deals.

Books Business | moore |

The Case For Space

Sunrise over a planetI recently read “The Case For Space“, by Robert Zubrin. It was great. Now, I have a degree in physics, but it’s been a long time since I did any math more complicated than algebra. So I can’t speak to the nuances of his calculations–I didn’t verify them. (A google search for reviews where people work through the math doesn’t turn up anything either.)

But I thoroughly enjoyed this overview. This book is in two parts.

The first covers where we are in space exploration now, and where the physics can let us be. He spends a lot of time on what we could do right now. But he also write a number of chapters on where we can be if there are scientific advances in energy generation (namely fusion). The author starts with low earth orbit (LEO) and then heads to the moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, the gas giants and beyond.

This section is a lot of fun. Zubrin covers areas that I never considered to be related to space (the power of transorbital flight to make the earth even smaller than it is today for travelers). He also talks about the economics of space flight and colonization. What exactly will the moon settlers or Martians have that they can sell? There’s a reference to a three way trade between Earth, Mars and the asteroid belt. I really enjoyed the details he dove into. For example:

“In the almost Earth normal atmosphere of Titan, you would not need a pressure suit, just a dry suit to keep out the cold. On your back, you could carry a tank of liquid oxygen, which would need no refrigeration in Titan’s environment…and could supply your breathing needs for a weeklong trip…”

The second part is supposed to be more inspirational, as if getting to space wasn’t inspirational enough. He covers various reasons (freedom, security, survival) that we should be getting off Earth. I found this section less exciting, but I can understand why he included this–if you aren’t excited about space travel for the adventure, Zubrin might convince you in this section.

There were parts of this book that dragged on a bit, but for the most part the prose is accessible and the math skippable. The real world plans that he outlines, especially at the beginning of the book focused on reusable spacecraft technology, LEO, the moon and Mars, are fascinating for their audacity and specificity. Recommended.

Books | moore |

Book Review: Goliath

I recently read Goliath, by Matt Stoller. It was, I’ll be honest, hard going. Not because it wasn’t interesting or because the writing was bad. Just because it’s a dry subject and there are a lot of people involved.

The book is about how we (the USA, there’s really no coverage of any other country) think about the economy. Who is in charge? Big business, or people opposed to big business, who Stoller calls anti monopolists, and who most often act through government institutions.

The author starts with Teddy Roosevelt and the early 1900s, covers Wilson’s presidency (I had no idea he was so progressive, nor what an impact Brandeis had), the 1920s and the power of the financier and secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon. The Great Depression gets some interesting coverage and we learn about how Mellon was almost impeached (he resigned before the House took up the matter). The anti monopolists were ascendant in the 1930s, interestingly in part because of fear of fascism coming to the USA. During the 1940s and 1950s when there was a pretty firm understanding that large enterprises were not good for the country. This was based on an shared understanding of the causes of the Depression. Then the Chicago school begins and starts to chip away at the intellectual underpinnings of the anti monopolist move. This combines with a re-imagining of the American populace as consumers rather that small business owners and farmers.

This accelerates in the 1970s, and the fed starts to rescue failing enterprises like Penn Central. In the 1980s the author discusses Michael Milken and how he ran the junk bond markets through a combination of market making and outright fraud. He also talks about how the savings and loans crises and the uneven unwinding of regulation affect the economy. He also covers briefly the rise of Walmart. Stoller also discusses turning points where the free-market philosophy could have been reversed, but instead, due to a lack of understanding of the monopolistic roots of the Great Depression, it is not. This happens with both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom came to power during economic downturns, and both of whom followed financiers’ advice. At the end he discusses how the intellectual foundation of anti monopolyism is being rebuilt, and invites everyone to join.

The book was much more interesting to me when it was covering earlier history. He threads a lot of it together by talking about Wright Patman, a Texas congressman who was a valiant defender of the anti monopoly practices and institutions that were created after the Depression (the FTC, the Justice Department’s Antitrust division).

This book, long and dry as it was at times, was important for two reasons. First, you have to know history before you can understand the current day. Second, there’s a lot of populist anger (justified in my mind) about the way that the Great Recession was handled, and I think that is shown in both Trump and some of the current Democratic candidates. I’m very interested in that anger being harnessed in as constructive a way as possible. I also think that it’s a valueable conversation to have about the tradeoff between economic efficiency and economic resilience. From what I’ve read of systems thinking, the way the US economy has been structured since the 1980s has been tilted towards efficiency, but is that the right answer? I don’t know, but I do know that I believe that the economy exists to serve society, not the other way around, and so if a democratic society wants to restructure the economy, that’s fine by me.

Books | moore |