blairharper

The very first thing I do on a Greenfield project or when taking on an existing codebase is implement strict LoC rules in CI/linters. Anything over 800 lines gets a line freeze.

Anything over 600 lines is considered for a refactor when it's touched if appropriate, anything over 800 lines must be refactored when touched. (Combination of AGENTS.md and custom lint warnings/errors).

Anything over 1000 lines forms the refactoring backlog. This way, the bleeding stops immediately and a lot of debt that would otherwise sit in a refactoring backlog forever gets chipped away at over time. The debt that doesn't get chipped is code that isn't touched often anyway and has been battle tested, so might as well be left alone.

> use of AI has indeed lowered the story point cost

It should not have. At least not significantly. Points should represent complexity, risk and overall effort (review burden, testing burden, dependencies, etc.), and so AI should increase velocity before it decreases story point estimates.

Over time, if a team's baseline delivery model genuinely changes, then reference stories can be recalibrated, but casually saying "AI lowered the point cost" is usually a smell that points are being treated as time estimates.

This is the same reason points should not = days even without AI. Velocity is what tells you if a team is getting better through training, tooling, hiring/firing, or process improvements. Re-pointing the same class of work downward hides the gain.

> I don’t want APIs, I want agents to use the same CLI tooling I already use that is locally available.

I do not want agents using the same elevated auth I have via my CLI tooling. One hallucination with your gh cli and the blast radius is every repo you have write (or worse, admin) access to.

MCP lets you scope tokens down (on supported platforms), or at minimum gives you something you can revoke independently.

The real cult is the engineers who refuse to shift their perception of what "good" or "quality" means in a world where humans, for the most part, won't be reading or writing code anymore.

I get it, existential threats are scary, but you can't just shit talk them and hope they go away.

Welfare should rightly fund "survival" and "levelling the playing field" resources, but charity can offer more than that - it can offer quality of life and a sense of community/belonging. It's nice to be around other people who are going through the same things, and people who support you.

So I think charity will always have a role, both financially and socially.

Thank you for the kind words! I’m glad you appreciated my writing.

False modesty wasn’t my intention, I’ll do better to explain myself next time. I didn’t mean to address any view of my own competence, more that I was able to build a successful career without going through conventional channels, and with an anxiety disorder. I was by all accounts, a drop out with mental health problems.

My writing skills come from a career in writing government policy documents and stakeholder communications. Not formal education channels.

The London tube system is one of the oldest underground networks in the world. There’s no air conditioning, in fact it’s gotten so hot down there that the network has heated up the soil and clay around the tunnels. Heat management is a big infrastructure problem for Transport for London.

You’re completely right though, feeling too hot in a crowded space made me claustrophobic and became a significant environmental factor for me.

That’s interesting about financial/housing anxiety in NYC. I wonder if that’s something to do with renting? I was fortunate to be able to buy a place in London which meant my outgoings were fairly stable and predictable. Working in government also meant my job was pretty secure.