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What happens when you go to bed and your AI teams carry on working? My old friend and colleague Martin Davidson returns to Asynchronous & Unreliable to talk about his latest experiments in building software with AI. Martin has spent decades producing highly resilient systems, and more than two years exploring how to get AI to produce high-quality software. Even with that perspective, he says the pace of change over the past fortnight has been astonishing.
We discuss agents that lead teams for weeks, find work to do when they are blocked, and share computing resources without waiting for Martin to organise everything. That raises some interesting questions about hiring: what skills would another person need, and would adding them actually help?
We also talk about something rather familiar from working with humans: being nice. Martin finds some models much easier to work with than others, and we explore how clear communication, humour and likeability affect collaboration. Along the way there are old Unix workstations, game emulators, a cache/cash joke, and a little product placement for Jon Berger’s What Happens When You Are Not in the Room?
By the end, Martin’s agents are producing enough code and commits to run into infrastructure limits that rarely troubled his human teams. This is the first half of our conversation.
In this episode- How quickly AI development practices are changing, even for experienced users.
- Recruiting for aptitude, imagination and a willingness to experiment.
- AI agents leading teams, helping one another and working overnight.
- Emulating old computers and exploring software behaviour through testing.
- Martin’s experience of different models, their costs and their communication styles.
- Whether likeability and kindness help human and AI teams work better.
- The cost of reopening a large conversation after its cache has gone cold.
- Four million lines of Rust, thousands of daily commits, and new infrastructure bottlenecks.
- Martin’s Substack: https://0x4d44.substack.com/
- What Happens When You Are Not in the Room? — Jon Berger.
- Influence — Robert Cialdini.
- The Unix Haters Handbook.
- Building Microservices — Sam Newman.
- Data Connection; Yanqing Cheng; EU BSDCon in Brussels.
- Rust, Ghidra, Windows 3.1 and Win16 applications.
- HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris and AIX.
- Doom, FreeCell, Formula One Grand Prix and Portal.
Model comparisons, prices and product behaviour discussed here reflect Martin’s experience at the time of recording.
