james_ross

6 ms·

1.
by james_ross 1mo ago
The key sentence in this post is when the author says that to understand something, you must actively engage with it. Part of me thinks that saying books don’t work is a bit like saying, say, barbells don’t work. Like barbells, books are pa
2.
by james_ross 2mo ago
It seems inevitable that automating change verification is going to be necessary, and like other previous trends like automated testing, it’s going to take us all a few years to get our heads around it and work out how to do it well.
3.
by james_ross 2mo ago
LOL thanks for the feedback :)
4.
by james_ross 2mo ago
Across our ~600 engineers adoption of AI coding tools is about 85 percent, and there is an undeniable uptrend in activity as a result. Parking for a moment if there is any value to that increase in activity, the question is about what benef
5.
by james_ross 2mo ago
I very much agree with and relate to the stance this article takes, that a domain model expressed in plain text that is both human readable and agent accessible is a _very_ good idea to keep agent-generated code more coherent than it otherw
6.
by james_ross 2mo ago
I'm quite sure it won't be long until tools of this kind are a normal part of every developer's environment who is coding with AI agents, because we are all burning so many tokens re-establishing our agent's understandin
7.
by james_ross 2mo ago
Concrete and practical advice for dealing with a widely shared issue in large software environments with ISO and other certifications to cater to. Thanks for sharing an article about modern AI assisted engineering without the slightest hint
8.
by james_ross 2mo ago
This is a nice frame for thinking about the divergence in attitudes towards coding with AI assistance in different environments; thanks for sharing. As someone who’s spent decades in brown field environments, my starting assumption when sta
9.
by james_ross 2mo ago
This article takes me back to the Martin Fowler book many years ago that for some reason was far less popular than most of his were at the time on DSLs. Reading the DDD book around the same time plus Novak’s Learning How to Learn was the co
10.
by james_ross 2mo ago
I think this class of tool is solving a problem that needs solving, and an “amnesia tax” is a great way to frame it. I had PMB on my list to evaluate for this purpose and I’ll add yours to my list. Are you able to compare and contrast it wi
11.
by james_ross 2mo ago
Thanks for sharing an honest and balanced take after going down a path that many people would be wondering about. In the last six months I’ve built a product from scratch that I’m in the process of commercialising and I have also found a re
12.
by james_ross 2mo ago
I've always loved and used flashcards, and relate to this article. I have built my own learning tool based on concept maps, which was inspired by Joseph D. Novak's book "Learning How to Learn". Concept maps are focused o
13.
by james_ross 2mo ago
It has always mattered for a team to be on the same page about what words mean in your domain. In 2026 it matters even more, because your newest team members are AI coding agents — and they need that agreement in an even more accessible for
14.
Show HN: Concepticon – manage your team's domain language like source code(thinkingtools.software)
1 points by james_ross 2mo ago|1 comments
15.
by james_ross 2mo ago
This is an easy to understand and apply approach, thanks for sharing. To go deeper, I might apply the thinking processes from the Theory of Constraints. As Goldratt used to say, “there’s an assumption under every arrow” in the diagrams you
16.
by james_ross 2mo ago
I think everyone is right on this question :) I have certainly worked in places where there were enormous code bases written in dead languages going back to the 1970s and I was part of the collective belief that nothing could be done about
17.
by james_ross 2mo ago
I don't _think_ so, but my understanding of BMAD is second hand. I gather it provides multiple types of agents who play different roles but that those roles are predefined. The frame work I am using lets you "hire" people of
18.
by james_ross 2mo ago
this issue resonates for me very much, as a one person startup experimenter in 2026 like a whole bunch of other people. I have a day job with lots of human interaction, but I've been trying to find the edges of what's possible as
19.
by james_ross 2mo ago
I'm a huge fan of looking back to sources outside our own field for ideas on how to cope with the changes within it. An influential one on me comes from education, too, "Learning How to Learn" by Joseph D. Novak. The main tak
20.
by james_ross 2mo ago
This makes sense to me, and reminds me of the more familiar variation in rates of chage in building business systems. I think I first came across this in the writing of Ronald G. Ross in relation to his business rules approach. At the botto
21.
by james_ross 3mo ago
Yes it's a product of mine, but it's actually a recent rebuild in desktop app form of an app I built as a web app well over a decade ago. And yes, I used it to get hmans on the same page at some scale, which you can hear me descri
22.
by james_ross 3mo ago
This article describes one of the classic polarities in our industry, the tension between the short term and long term. There are many others, such as the tension between autonomy and alignment in organisations with lots of teams. The artic
23.
by james_ross 3mo ago
this looks very interesting to me and I plan to try it. I was looking at the web site (pmbai.dev) earlier today and it looked very thorough but when I went to show someone this afternoon it no longer loads in my browser, saying it can'
24.
by james_ross 3mo ago
Depending on your definition of context, my attempt to solve just the foundational context of what words mean in a given domain, and sharing it cleanly, quickly and reliably with both new people in the team and AI agents, is the humble conc
25.
by james_ross 3mo ago
Ha — you actually did it. Genuinely made my day; you've now read it more recently than I have. And I think you've landed where I did: the concept-mapping part is the keeper and the rest I have not put to practical use.
26.
by james_ross 3mo ago
I'm intrigued by this idea, and plan to test it to build a new product that is a sibling of an existing one, but with a different targeted purpose. I believe it's verifiable enough to try a goal oriented approach but I'm slig
27.
by james_ross 3mo ago
I'm about to try Matt Pocock's skills for more rigorous agentic engineering now that my code base is climbing towards 100kloc, but can't yet testify to their effectiveness. People I trust swear by them: https://git
28.
by james_ross 3mo ago
a good read indeed! Makes me think about my use of coding agents differently, as the main thing they do is deal with a lot of details that matter to the execution but don't matter to me personally enough to figure them out. Would love
29.
by james_ross 3mo ago
This matches my experience as well, as the one person team on a desktop app with thousands of unit tests and hundreds of playwright e2e tests. I had a number of flaky tests that Claude was self selecting to isolate when running the tests an
30.
by james_ross 3mo ago
I agree, but I get the impression talking to others and from articles like this one that everyone's experience is real, it's just that the diversity of experiences is so vast that there are some really good ones and some really ba

More ›