Articles for category: Delivery

Counting Token Shock

Counting Lines of Code became… Counting Number of Unit Tests Generated became… Generating the number of class files became… Ensuring we had everything commented, which became… An unlimited number of TODOs in our code. And now we are counting Tokens of usage and surprise, surprise – we are gamifying and overusing them so that our metrics look inflated. I AM SHOCKED!!!! Yes, your team should be using AI. But if you’re measuring your team by their token consumption, it’s a lazy, easy metric. Instead, why not look at; As with development metrics of the past, the first metric identified is

1 week ago

Greg Thomas

One thing AI will never be able to do

Spend 3 hours trying to force your way through a problem because you’re a developer and you think you can code anything. So you spend 3 hours going up against the wall, even using Claude to help you with what you are doing wrong. And then you finally read the KB article associated with the error and realize you just wasted 3 hours. But wow… what a day of trying to make the impossible work.

Who Generated this Code?

Is that the question we will be asked going forward? What tool did we use to generate code? If we answer that we wrote it ourselves, will we be revered as an elder who once used the magical keyboard of Orbos to decipher the code of Phobos? I don’t think any of that exists. This was a question that mattered 4 – 5 years ago when something looked off, and you wondered how something was being built. Does it matter now, though? Is it more a question of “How was this code generated?” that we will be asked going forward?

Now is the Time to Learn

There has never been a more important time to always be learning. I don’t know if there ever will (maybe when we get transporters). Each day, come out with something new – it doesn’t have to generate mass revenue and hockey stick growth in a day. It might not even pay off today. But in the next month, three months, or six, it will pay off. Now is the time to learn, schedule it, make it part of your daily cadence.

The Importance of Design

Design without code is not a great design; it’s airy, never been proven, just there, who knows what it could mean. Design is important, whether you do it with AI or on your own; there is value in that work, and it is largely unhidden. If it fails, everyone knows it was a bad design. If it works, no one ever mentions it again. Some of the best code I ever wrote was a simple design to send out invoices every day to customers to get our money.  It ran for years without ever needing someone to coddle it or