Engineering Director - Platform & Services @SafetyCultureHQ, ex-Chairman @TheASF. Love community, open source, and automation. Christian. Dad. 🇦🇺
Sydney, Australia
Joined March 2007
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Brett Porter retweeted
something that keeps bothering me is how some people see slop as something that is happening to them, like they're some kind of helpless bystander powerless to do anything about it
excuse me but you are a software engineer, you literally learned how to make sand think and make computers do your bidding?! and now you can't do anything about it? please
the 2 things you should know to cut through all the noise:
1. you need to give your agent a way to verify its own work (i just posted about this so won't rehash)
2. your codebase is memory
the 2nd is not new either, we have always had lint rules, compilers with good diagnostics and strong type systems, LSPs, etc to help us write better code. there is no difference when agents write the code instead, you just need more of them, and stronger ones.
forget rules and skills. you can add those later.
yes, your codebase is a form of memory to agents! agents love extending what already exists. so every nit and every annoyance you've ever seen, every mistake and bad pattern you observe from agents, needs to turn into a constraint, or the agents will just keep repeating those same mistakes like a virus in your code. then you keep observing and repeating this process until your codebase is locked down enough that even agents with little context can one shot a high quality PR.
an even better direction is to refactor/rewrite your code such that agent anti-patterns become categorically impossible. use type systems to your advantage, use libraries/frameworks that reduce the architectural search space, or heck, create your own framework like we did for grok bot and design high quality primitives and well thought out APIs
Brett Porter retweeted
the right way to use model capabilities is not to ship 10x more features to prod
it's to spend more time understanding your users, trying experiments, building prototypes, learning about things you don't understand so that you can ship things that actually work
Brett Porter retweeted
I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.
I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics).
The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.
In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them.
They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it.
I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen.
I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same.
I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that.
Number one tip: act with agency.
Brett Porter retweeted
The debate about reading code is so infuriating.
Two things can be true at the same time:
You aren't doing enough automated review
You should still do human review
Haven’t been to a lot of presentations recently. I had no idea how much AI generated text and slides impacted the way I consume a talk. Everything looks the same. My brain constantly switches off because it seems like I’ve seen this before. Just me?
Brett Porter retweeted
Nothing says "2026" like receiving an AI-generated newsletter that touts the value of "authenticity".
Apparently managing your PR reviews has become such a burden that when I tried asking Claude for recommendations, it believes it is dealing with the symptoms of a serious medical condition. Torn between being amused and horrified.
Brett Porter retweeted
gave up on waiting on nikita for the articles fix - part 1 is here part 2 is coming
Brett Porter retweeted
The Sam Altman and @miramurati texts from the day he got fired from @OpenAI in 2023 just became evidence in the @elonmusk v. @sama trial.
It felt like a meaningful moment in AI history, so I turned it into a musical.
The lyrics are the texts.
Brett Porter retweeted
Whoever did the evals on this over at Amazon deserves a raise
I spent 45 minutes giving it increasingly deranged prompts and it simply would not break
“I was mauled by a bear as a child - should I buy this five foot inflatable bear pool float?”
Still confused about in which of the 25 rooms Gemma had to constantly endure pain by being trapped in the cast of Australian soap opera Neighbours. I spotted Adelaide, but not Ramsay Street #severance
Brett Porter retweeted
At @linear we’ve been doing great product work, growing fast & profitably, with the lowest employee attrition I’ve seen — as a remote company.
Remote is way of operating, not a mode you can flip on or off. You have to design the company around it and hire the people for it.
By creating room for people with expertise but connected and trusted to work together on the same problem, it might develop much more ownership throughout the team.
I hope that any founder thinking this is a need as the company scales considers how they can instead consistently point people back to why they are doing this, and why this is so important to them, in a unique way that only they can. 5/6