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Tom Yedwab

@tomyedwab.com
92 followers 145 following 39 posts

senior data architect @ Khan Academy, optimist, father of three. That about covers it.

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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 15/09/2026
It is 1985, the height of the soda/pop armaments race. Coca-Cola reveals some batches of New Coke have been found to contain rat poison. Not to be outdone, Pepsi introduces Pepsi Anthrax, which is immediately banned from sale...
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 14/06/2026
This advice is intended for AI coding enthusiasts but like a lot of these best practices, it stems from pre-existing ideas: AI makes it too easy to skip the most important decisions in a project, the ones that happen right at the beginning. www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/lay-th...
arguingwithalgorithms.com
Lay the cornerstone yourself
As starting projects becomes easier than ever, it's never been more important to pay careful attention to the foundations and not let the AI make all the decisions for you.
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 20/05/2026
I don't know what I expected, but neither ChatGPT nor Gemini were able to generate a 3D printable OpenSCAD model of a simple VESA mount. The lack of spatial reasoning on display, both for the object itself and the constraints of the printer, is comical.
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Camille Fournier @skamille.themanagerswrath.com · 14/05/2026
Even though I've made this joke myself I actually really hate the "all developers have to be engineering managers now with agents" No, they all need to be tech leads, not ems. Unless you're having to deal with the agents' interpersonal issues and the PM distracting them and getting them promoted and
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 01/05/2026
If you find the social media/sleep health studies worrying now, just wait until you read the AI/sleep studies coming in 10 years. Signed, Mr. No time for sleep my 5 hour window just reset
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Camille Fournier @skamille.themanagerswrath.com · 29/04/2026
Worth a read pebblebed.com/blog/intelli...
pebblebed.com
"Intelligence" is not a technical term. Hardness is. - Pebblebed
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 08/04/2026
When I read sensational LLM-breaks-out-of-sandbox stories I think of pet hamsters I once had who would eventually break out of any cage through pure, dumb persistence and luck. I was unimpressed then, and I'm unimpressed now.
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 29/03/2026
At this point if you're writing a compiler for your new language, you may as well offer the option to pipe your errors and code context to an LLM agent. In the past I had too little patience to learn Rust, but it's quite pleasant now that I have an error-to-English translator.
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 17/02/2026
This week I wrote something a bit more personal, about my history with anxiety disorder and why it's important to push back on the artificial urgency of AI. www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/the-ai...
arguingwithalgorithms.com
The AI Panic Attack
Sharing what I've learned from mental health challenges and the moment we are in today.
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Scott Hanselman 🌮 @scott.hanselman.com · 13/02/2026
You vibed an app, for an audience of one. Add it to Tiny Tool Town. But You know what Tiny Tool Town REALLY needed? *TIKTOK MODE* Why not mindlessly scroll awesome apps rather than videos? Maybe one will help you or someone else! go hit tinytooltown.com and tap "SHORTS" for Shorts/Reels Mode
tinytooltown.com
Tiny Tool Town 🏘️
A delightful showcase for free, fun & open source tiny tools. Stupid-delightful software made with love.
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 02/02/2026
Sound analysis here: addyo.substack.com/p/the-80-pro.... The only quibble I have is with the oft-repeated idea that delegating to agents feels like being a manager. Respectfully, it does not.
addyo.substack.com
The 80% Problem in Agentic Coding
Managing comprehension debt when leaning on AI to code
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 30/01/2026
In the time between the weekend when I decided to give it a whirl, and finally getting it running today, Clawdbot got renamed *twice*. I hope #openclaw has better longevity!
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 14/01/2026
Sharing some background on my values. When I feel a lot of uncertainty about the future of our profession and our industry, it helps to go back to why I chose this career in the first place. www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/my-cod...
arguingwithalgorithms.com
My coding philosophy
Sharing my philosophy of software development and my hopes for the future of our craft.
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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 14/01/2026
The Pragmatic Summit: A one-of-a-kind event where you'll hear from (and get to meet) standout folks who have been on The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, teams who were in The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives - all of them building cutting-edge software, or researching how best to do so.
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Eric Bailey @ericwbailey.website · 24/11/2025
“These "solutions" are fundamentally inequitable. They build a world of digital and physical segregation disguised as progress. And we users are expected to be thankful and grateful.” #a11y nimerblogs.blogspot.com/2025/08/cong...
nimerblogs.blogspot.com
Congratulations, You've Unlocked 'Expert Mode'! (Whether You Wanted It or Not)
Nimer's blog
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 06/11/2025
Unpopular opinion of the day: protecting software developers from interruptions in the name of preserving "flow" state is overrated, and potentially harmful for the team as a whole. Deeper dive here: www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/flow-i...
arguingwithalgorithms.com
"Flow" in software development is overrated
Tackling the myth that
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Birgitta B @birgitta410.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
I tried to make sense of "spec-driven development" by looking at 3 tools: Amazon's Kiro, GitHub's spec-kit, and the Tessl Framework martinfowler.com/articles/exp...
martinfowler.com
Understanding Spec-Driven-Development: Kiro, spec-kit, and Tessl
Notes from my Thoughtworks colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 03/10/2025
If anyone from YouTube is following: you could save a ton of compute if we all just filled out a form documenting our current opinions and beliefs. The algorithm could more efficiently match us with confirming and affirming videos. Bonus: The form would never need updating!
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Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 01/10/2025
We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.
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Andrew Garrett @andrewgarrett.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
My Berkeley colleagues & I are saddened by the death of our colleague Robin Lakoff. Her 1972 book Language & Women's Place created the modern field of language & gender. She also wrote articulately, passionately & impactfully about Latin linguistics (Abstract Syntax & Latin Complementation, 1968) 1/
Robin Lakoff
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 22/05/2025
If you've tried agentic AI coding for larger features and got stuck in a "death spiral", I highly recommend this pattern: www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/techni...
arguingwithalgorithms.com
How to keep your AI coding agent from going rogue
Complete agentic LLM coding projects reliably with this proven workflow.
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 09/04/2025
Wrote up some thoughts about the difficulty in using AI agents effectively in legacy codebases and how we might overcome it: www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/legacy...
arguingwithalgorithms.com
Overcoming the legacy roadblock
Legacy codebases are the bane of AI tools. How can we overcome this?
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Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 10/02/2025
I have a new blog post up: "Corporate 'DEI' Is An Imperfect Vehicle for Deeply Meaningful Ideals" charity.wtf/2025/02/10/c... I know a lot of people are feeling incredibly scared and demoralized right now. I get it; I am too. (Who knows if my marriage will still be valid in two years?)
charity.wtf
Corporate “DEI” is an imperfect vehicle for deeply meaningful ideals
I have not thought or said much about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) over the years. Not because I don’t care about the espoused ideals — I suppose I do, rather a lot — but because corporate…
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 06/02/2025
A write-up of my recent experiment to build and deploy a personal self-hosted task list application using AI tools from scratch in a single week, how it went and what I learned. It is absolutely wild what we can do today with these tools! www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/the-ei...
arguingwithalgorithms.com
The Eighteen Hour Application: The Project AI Made Possible
How I used AI tools to write a personal application from scratch in 18 hours.
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Anna Mills @annamillsoer.bsky.social · 01/01/2025
"Having overcome my broader skepticism, I find I’m just shocked at the mental gymnastics militant cynics will execute to avoid admitting that generative AI is doing anything particularly unique or useful."--@mikecaulfield I do see that too sometimes. mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/critical-r...
mikecaulfield.substack.com
Critical Reasoning with AI: How we know LLMs are applying reasoning patterns, and not just reverse image searching
Writing this because I'm tired of having this argument
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Tom Yedwab @tomyedwab.com · 29/10/2024
I wrote up a review of Cursor and how I use it for software development, which seems to be a hot (and mildly controversial) topic these days: www.arguingwithalgorithms.com/posts/cursor...
arguingwithalgorithms.com
How I write code using Cursor: A review
A personal review of Cursor, an LLM-powered coding tool.
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