iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Some good things to work on this week as collapses and power grabs surround and the operating instructions of the industrial growth domination and supremacy worldview are further revealed and clarified (remember apocalypse means "uncovering")

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

If you think the effects of dissolving the team's mental model of the system, by removing humans (authors and reviewers) from the path to production, will show up soon enough to reverse course safely, I have news for you.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

There's a big difference between emergence (in complex systems) and stochasticity, and there's often confusion of the latter with the former when reasoning about LLMs and their properties.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Independence as a means of scaling is often a mirage. Systems will always find a way to prove to you how interdependent things are. "Dancing with the system" starts with recognizing interdependence, not seeking the holy grail of independence.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Believe it or not, code review stops being a "bottleneck" as soon as you stop overproducing code.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Nick Tune @nick-tune.me · 11/09/2026

As a result, this is how I now judge LLMs: Are they a good pair programmer or assistant. Can they follow instructions, can they be taught good design principles, can they be taught not to do stupid workarounds? I don't care how genius the are, good maintainable code requires mastering the basics.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Nick Tune @nick-tune.me · 11/09/2026

This is also why big up-front planning is not sufficient. You can't predict all the guardrails and architecture rules the agent will hit during implementation (although you should try to anticipate as much as possible IMO). Everything I see points to software engineers being augmented by AI.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Nick Tune @nick-tune.me · 11/09/2026

And this is why you need to stay close to the code as an engineer. So you can actually understand and contribute to these discussions. You still own the design.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

It's interesting to think about the dynamics between product enshittification, which I feel has been on a sharp rise over the last couple of years, and central banks raising interest rates.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

One more day, one more "reading code when LLMs are spitting out so much code is impractical, so you should give it up" LinkedIn post.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Collaboration - of which throwing PRs over the wall is likely the most suboptimal way to go about it, if it can be called collaboration at all - was never only about making sure the code is correct.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

If teams' utilization is so high that it causes a non-linear increase in delays, adding more people while keeping the same utilization rate won't help reduce the delays you wanted to reduce by adding more people.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Too many of the same speakers at the same conferences.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Software delivery measurement vendors would like you to improve the metrics, but not to the point where you change the way of working (XP) to the point that you no longer need the vendor or the measurements.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Jason Gorman @jasongorman.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

The risk of doing great work in software development is that it can look like the team isn't trying as hard as the teams heroically fighting fires (that they started)

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Natia Kurdadze @natiakurdadze.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

The Toyota Way isn’t just about small gains. At its heart? Kaizen.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

The purpose of all automation and cost reduction we got as a result of technological improvement since the start of the Industrial Revolution was to spend more time on social networks and consuming polarizing and addictive content. The purpose of the system is what it does. (POSIWID).

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

The right time to intervene in systems where an exponential, reinforcing feedback loop is dominating the system's behavior is when it seems it's too soon. "Let's wait and see" is a guarantee that it'll be too late.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Tom Geraghty @tomgeraghty.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

“A numerical goal leads to distortion and faking, especially when the system is not capable of meeting the goal. Anybody will meet the quota (goal) allotted to him. He is not responsible for the losses so generated.” W E Deming, in “The New Economics”

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

The problem is that people deciding if developers should be writing code are very often the ones who have never had enough experience with writing code to have a good idea what the value of writing code is and the purpose it serves, but they are convinced they know.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Gale Sinatra @galesinatra.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I think we just passed oops.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

The counterintuitive idea about managing flow is that the leverage is most often much less about speeding up slow parts and much more about slowing down parts that are running too fast when taking into account the whole system.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Ted M. Young (he/him) aka @JitterTed @ted.dev · 21/06/2026

I've seen comments about accepting LLM-generated code in that we don't/can't understand it and excusing that because: "There's always code in the system that we don't understand"

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Ted M. Young (he/him) aka @JitterTed @ted.dev · 21/06/2026

Except, LLM-gen'd and human-written code are different. One was written by someone with a mental model. Modified by humans with another mental model (correct or not), etc. The other is generated by statistical, stochastic methods with constraints. These are not the same.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Slides from my talk "Agentic Coding - A Systems Perspective" or how not to inflate the elephant traveling through a boa constrictor. The talk combines Theory of Constraints, Systems Thinking, XP, and Lean lenses of agentic coding. drive.google.com/file/d/14YVq...

drive.google.com

Agentic Coding - A Systems Perspective.pdf

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Does it ever hit home that the ascendancy of AI is taken to be assured, but the shifting of human society to fit into earth system limits is seen as everything from a head-scratcher to a longshot to an impossibility?

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Effort one needs to put into reviewing plausible-looking code compared to code a teammate wrote is likely an order of magnitude higher per line of code, because it's plausible, and finding where that gap between plausible and right is feels like looking for a needle in a haystack.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Jon Reid @qualitycoding.org · 11/06/2026

I understand this just feels like "normal coding" to a lot of folks. But it runs directly against XP/Lean practices. It was waste.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

"Saving planet Earth" is coming from a good place, but it's yet another clue exposing deeply ingrained belief system revolving around human exceptionalism. Planet will save itself regardless of humans. Reality doesn't care what we think of it, or what we think it should be. It just is.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Sometimes the tail also needs to wag the dog as the dog wags the tail, so the dog knows that it cannot wag the tail as much as it thinks it can.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

It's not that the cost of code went to zero but that the cost of _plausible-looking code_ went to zero. It might've went to zero (hint: price hikes says not) but the surrounding costs in the process (cruft, complexity carrying costs, rework, etc.) went drastically up.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Last Week in Collapse open.substack.com/pub/lastweek...

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

open.substack.com/pub/lastweek...

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Any tooling that makes big changes easier or faster to review and/or deploy is still solving the wrong problem. Reality (production) doesn't care how long it took you to review a big batch or how difficult that was.

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Reposted by Dragan Stepanović

Steve Smith @stevesmithtech.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

You can't escape Goodhart's Law Amazon scraps AI leaderboard to stop workers chasing usage scores - www.ft.com/content/b1a6... via @FT

ft.com

Amazon scraps AI leaderboard to stop workers chasing usage scores

Senior executive Dave Treadwell tells staff ‘don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI’ as costs rise

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Every morning I wake up, sit at the computer, pull up Claude and ask it: "Where's my favorite next plausible token predictor?" and it just blushes back at me.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

"The problems the world faces today are not caused by our inability to achieve our goals—they are a direct result of our success. They are a result of how destructive we are in the pursuit of our goals." consilienceproject.org/development-...

consilienceproject.org

Development in Progress - The Consilience Project

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Writing a "you MUST do XYZ" rule in a markdown file and expecting LLM to follow it as you'd expect from a human being reminds me of my daughter yelling at Alexa because it doesn't understand the name of the song she wants it to play and her getting increasingly more frustrated.

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Dragan Stepanović @dstepanovic.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

There's a difference between focusing on generating code faster and figuring out sooner whether customers find value in what we ship. And I don't think that the former is necessarily helping with minimizing cumulative liability (code) and its carrying costs while maximizing value.

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