Some folks love doing demo days, but I find it sometimes gets in the way of actual work, creates more work in the long run, and/or can be downright demoralizing (especially to backend teams). Here’s why.

What is demo-driven development?

• Building something specifically to be able to show it off

• Rushing to get stuff in before an arbitrary deadline

• A way to get people motivated by an audience (positive) or shame (negative)

Some observations on vibe coding

I get a lot of questions about working with LLMs. Something I hear people discussing a lot is whether AI-generated code is better, or worse, or just more evil than human-generated code. I don’t think it’s an either/or question. To me, it’s just another tool: like most tools, there are ways to use them for good, or as weapons.

I think vibe coding is great if you need to write a one-off script that isn’t intended to be part of production code. For example, I asked Claude to help me come up with ways to generate fairly large test data sets for my last project, and it decided to write me a script to do it. This worked beautifully for what I needed, and saved me a ton of time. I did have to iterate on the prompt a bit to get it to do what I wanted, and that was a little nerve-wracking, so I saved off the different versions of the code (because sure enough, sometimes it got worse in ways I didn’t expect).

I’ve been doing a lot of work around grief lately.

Both of my parents died in 2023. Two other friends also died in 2023 - both former coworkers. One was in his mid-thirties and had a rare brain tumor; the other died from COVID. 

My dad’s death last June came after several months in the ICU. He endured repeated rounds of dialysis, which he hated, and ventilator-associated pneumonia, which I hadn’t heard of before. He had opted for open-heart surgery, I think because he didn’t fully understand the risks given that he was a cancer patient for over 10 years, and like many people, believed that doctors are superheroes. I was with him, and held his hand when they turned off the machines at his request.