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Sue Smith

@sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy
44 followers 0 following 1.7K posts

🎏 Writes code to help folk learn to write code 🪩 Smartarse swimmer 💅🏻 Still petty after cancer 🌉 bridged from ⁂ glasgow.social/@sue, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026
A funny thought about abstraction and programming with llms is that if anything I feel like learning shell scripting is going to be more valuable than ever, since the workflows for using agents etc rely heavily on "tool calls" and folk are burning through tokens getting models to do shit you can […]
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026
LinkedIn but it's the best outline of this I've found, if you're wondering why anthropic would invest so much in the claims of consciousness, personhood etc - it's an accountability sink, a way to dodge legal liability for the harms caused […]
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Original post on glasgow.social
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026
Not all explanations are equal: Social Explainable AI and Critical Computational Literacy www.raspberrypi.org/blog/not-all-ex…
raspberrypi.org
Not all explanations are equal: Social Explainable AI and Critical Computational Literacy - Raspberry Pi Foundation
Explore how Social XAI and Critical Computational Literacy help young people question AI explanations and their meanings
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Reposted by Sue Smith
Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026
Thinking this morning about how much of teaching is just taking the time to listen. Hearing what someone’s actual computer problem is and then addressing it is so much harder than just telling them what I think is interesting or cool. And sometimes I don’t know the answer to their actual […]
social.jvns.ca
Original post on social.jvns.ca
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026
Definitely seems like a shift in the ai discourse. It's becoming clearer that the potential of future impact from llms won't come from model advances so much as in what we build around them. More people becoming aware of the unhinged shit going on in the model companies. The fallout from […]
glasgow.social
Original post on glasgow.social
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Reposted by Sue Smith
Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026
Are you interested in learning how to use Git for the first time? (or almost the first time) we're looking for Git beginners to give us feedback on a Git tutorial! The tutorial will be open source when it's released, so you'll be helping many future beginners! Sign up here […]
social.jvns.ca
Original post on social.jvns.ca
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026
If you haven't seen the ai safety is a sex cult patter that's gone viral on bsky over the last few days.. I'd draw the line at recommending reading it, but I will say it starts to put some context on the thing about how the companies selling the model products frame themselves as "ai safety" […]
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Original post on glasgow.social
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026
Love a haunted rightmove listing www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/9328…
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026
A fun side effect of the project I'm working on is that I'm having to learn about debugging architecture and now I want to murder everyone ever involved in it
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026
Blogged a bit about what I've been learning about models and harnesses www.sue.codes/blog/harnessissoftware
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026
This is really good www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/…
thoughtworks.com
Should we still design code for humans?
If AI is writing code, do we still need to design code for humans? Valentina Servile argues that we do and that we shouldn't give full autonomy to agents.
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026
Since Dario Amodei said some stupid shit about cancer allow me to repeat, there is no better indicator that someone doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about than mentions of "curing cancer"
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026
Maximising on my employer-free status by shitposting on linkedin 👍🏻
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026
"But if you zoom out, it becomes clear that almost every “breakthrough” since last summer has concerned the narrow domains of computer code and math, which are defined by highly structured languages and come accompanied by massive amounts of specialized training data. And yet, even in this […]
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Original post on glasgow.social
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026
Thoroughly recommend this talk, touching on the loss of public trust ai is creating, actual programming abstractions, and optimising for the humans as well as the machines www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZgglPK8Rg0
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026
This is cool, a vscode extension that steps through execution in slow motion marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?…
marketplace.visualstudio.com
Slowbug - Debug your code in slow-mo! - Visual Studio Marketplace
Extension for Visual Studio Code - Slowbug is a VS Code extension for debugging your code in slow-mo.
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026
My partner is called John and after a quarter of a century you might think I'd have stopped making "Dear John" jokes
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026
In case you were wondering if companies are using AI generated team and role titles.. The answer is yes, yes they are
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026
I am once again asking for a run button www.sue.codes/blog/runbutton
sue.codes
I am once again asking for a run button
Sometimes it isn't the most complicated things that put people off learning.
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2026
"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has expressed concern about new talent coming to the firm for the money rather than the mission" So annoying when your employees care more about money than the mission of *checks notes* rendering employees obsolete lol fucking hell […]
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Original post on glasgow.social
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026
The project I'm working on is necessitating learning a bit about the debug adapter protocol and at some point I need to accept I'm doing it to myself
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/07/2026
If you are in a public place and a musician is playing you must clap and shame others into doing so it's the social contract
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026
If there is a swimming competition on telly I will always put it on, I don't really care what happens in the races, I just like seeing the swimming pool
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026
This from @gvwilson hints at what I struggle with, so many people have attached so hard to a particular view of a technology that they can't contemplate either its benefits or its harms depending on the view.. Whatever choices you make about using the technology, this is a self-defeating […]
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026
Reddit thread: "Is claude for the upper class?" www.reddit.com/r/claude/s/FPQVfcjJzF
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/07/2026
Finding it bizarre that model collapse is still not being taken seriously especially with the claims about coding being over etc mastodon.social/@404mediaco/1169868…
mastodon.social
404 Media (@404mediaco@mastodon.social)
“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination." https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026
Maybe one day the men will learn to just not but that day is not today
LinkedIn 

Sue Smith

Author

Helping folk learn how to code

now

My take is informed by decades of being immersed in teaching developer skills, coding pedagogy, and learning science, but I'm sure your vibes based one is equally legit.
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026
I do believe these tools can enable people to build software who might not have before, but the platforms are enabling it by creating the illusion of progress that I increasingly think makes it harder after the first stage and might end up putting folk off continuing An experience that helps […]
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026
The walkback continues www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-study-sa…
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026
Building a vscode extension is certainly making me nostalgic for the early devrel jobs I did teaching APIs using only their source code because no one had bothered writing docs of any kind loool
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/07/2026
I will obviously give this an actual UI of its own but here's a peek at some early progress on my vscode extension that helps someone learn about a codebase using a combo of static + dynamic analysis and language model queries exposed through the debugging flow
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026
This fucking claude ad "If it ends up taking like almost all the jobs, then what does it mean to work" Doubling down on this *as companies start to rehire* workers laid off with AI as an excuse, they can't revise the rhetoric because rendering workers obsolete is the value prop.. Meanwhile […]
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2026
I don't think Ray is on mastodon but extremely, this "The technical improvements were ultimately a side benefit of this agentic rewrite. The real business function was publicity. It helped Anthropic tell the story it needs to tell, the story that “AI is enough”." […]
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Original post on glasgow.social
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026
"Vibe coding shows us what happens when fluency outpaces thought. But the deeper risk is systemic: the technologies designed to enhance human–computer interaction may strip away that interaction. In education, especially in early and formative years, we cannot afford to collapse the space […]
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Original post on glasgow.social
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026
This is why I take the Raspberry Pi Foundation resources so seriously, while everyone is debating what AI can or can't do, they're getting stuck in and preparing kids for the reality they're going to find themselves in This one is their developing view of computational thinking […]
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2026
Another belter from Kin, on orienting yourself in software systems kinlane.com/2026/07/02/orienting-yo…
kinlane.com
Orienting Yourself in a System You Didn’t Build
One of the things Sue Smith and I talked about the other day in our Write Through It conversation was how you can orient yourself in a system you didn’t build. It is a continuation of mine and Sue’s beliefs around the state of “View Source”, but beyond just learning web development, and actually understanding how systems work, not just a single website or web application.
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2026
Interesting linkedin post on the language parsing in claude code I'm having to learn a wee bit about static analysis for the project I'm working on so found this doubly informative www.linkedin.com/pulse/under-claude…
linkedin.com
Under the Claude Code hood: generative grammars doing the heavy lifting
The source for Claude Code leaked by accident on the 31st of March 2026. Having the ability to lift the hood is quite interesting.
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/07/2026
Between edtech aimed at schools and workplace lms platforms, some of the most predatory business practices in software come from companies making "learning" products.. I think this surprises people because they assume there's some intrinsic motivation to work on education stuff, but it's the […]
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/07/2026
Re last boost this is where I refer again to the Raspberry pi foundation pedagogy where they design steps specifically for the learner to experience taking ownership of a project
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2026
I mean obviously some of this will be reversed (it's already starting) when companies realise humans they laid off were business critical, but this was never about money first and foremost, it's about power and control, they always trump profit […]
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2026
Swimwear that isn't designed for swimming is right up there for me with "learning" tech that's not for learning 😑
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/07/2026
Thinking about the slow death of view source and what could conceivably come after it www.sue.codes/blog/afterviewsource
sue.codes
What comes after view source?
We still need pathways for people to understand how software systems work.
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/07/2026
As you may have noticed I've been writing a ludicrous number of blog posts recently as writing helps me make sense of what's happening.. Well @kin does the same and so we added talking through it to the mix youtu.be/w3kV6JtJFIw
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/06/2026
Emailing myself a lot at the moment which typically means shenanigans are afoot
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/06/2026
Presumably the plan with this one is to get them to train the ai better then refire the folk, question is whether they'll realise that isn't going to work before they get to that stage.. I really hope people are charging companies through the nose when this happens […]
glasgow.social
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026
Celebrating no natural hair day with the girls
Me in front of the Golden Girls warhol style wall hanging
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/06/2026
Back when I started doing dev education work I would frequently have to document an api or whatever using only the source code which was obviously a ton of fun.. Trying to build what I'm working on now is taking me back to that, it's like in the rush to make everything agent readable we've […]
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/06/2026
Another example of value in the process, not just the outcome.. Again, conflating work with the artifact of it leads to automating the wrong things surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/06/19/i…
surfingcomplexity.blog
I am dreading our LLM-written incident report future
Comments
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/06/2026
This looks like a fantastic resource, Teaching Programming Across Disciplines teaching-programming.github.io/book
teaching-programming.github.io
Teaching Programming Across Disciplines
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Sue Smith @sue.glasgow.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/06/2026
My favourite time of year, this was at 11pm ♥️
Dusk from inside a train carriage, pink and purple sky with dark city structures ahead
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