Latest posts
- arcade.ly now has an MCP server
Category:AI
arcade.ly now has an MCP server. If you use an AI assistant or agent that supports MCP you can point it at
https://arcade.ly/mcpand ask it about the site directly: which games there are, how to play them, who’s top of the hiscore tables, and what I’ve been writing about on here.It’s free, read-only, and there’s no sign-up or authentication required. Everything you need to connect is on the MCP server page, which you’ll also find in the links at the bottom of every page.
[Read more] - Agentic Software Delivery & The End Of Source Code As We Know It
Category:AI
Last night I went out for drinks and pizza with colleagues. As we were chatting away one person said to the group that the logical conclusion of progress in agentic development, with direct human interaction with code ever decreasing, is the complete elimination of source code. Instead agents would work directly with binary machine-readable forms because, after all, if the code will never be read by humans, why would it need to be human-readable?
I’ve heard similar things before and they’ve never sat quite right with me. But, for various reasons, I’ve never given them much serious thought. Last night was no exception: I was several drinks in, feeling relaxed and happy, and didn’t feel like getting into an argument that I couldn’t even articulate beyond a vague sense of unease with the position. And so the conversation quickly moved on.
[Read more] - Why is Agentic Coding so Tiring? An Incomplete Hypothesis
Category:Musings
When AI powered coding was in its infancy - a mere 4 years ago - with the first release of GitHub Copilot, I started to use it on a Python project or two, and I kind of found it to be a sort of Intellisense++. Despite the problems it was definitely a bit better than what had gone before, but perhaps not revolutionary.
During the mania of 2023 I was leading development more than doing development, as Savanta looked to accelerate various elements of its platform and workflows with AI - from survey design and creation, fieldwork and data collection, and then through to analysis and delivery - and most of my use of LLMs was for activities other than coding.
[Read more] - Thank You Joan Stark
Category:Musings
I wanted to take a brief moment to thank Joan G Stark and give her the credit she deserves for her contributions to the arcade.ly site header.
Joan is a prolific ASCII artist who was very active in the early years of the web - from what I can find starting around 1996, and then up until roughly 2004. She’s been and remains hugely influential within the internet ASCII art community and is still popular to this day.
[Read more] - Not many people are mourning for Stack Overflow
Category:Musings
The other day the topic of LLMs killing Stack Overflow came up again on Hacker News. Not for the first time, and not the only place it’s been discussed - it’s been talked about a lot in different forums and channels.
And what’s notable about these discussions - given how beloved Stack Overflow used to be amongst software engineers - is the ambivalence, and sometimes the outright hostility of the conversations.
[Read more]