So you are saying that test driven development is:
a) not useful for you and your use cases
b) never useful in any use cases
c) sometimes useful but not for you
There's an old Drucker quote "there's nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
If you're in the wrong market or building for the wrong customers you can execute brilliantly on everything you mentioned and it won't matter. The only thing that matters is product market fit or finding it if you don't have it. That's what I see as unsaid in your parent's comment about "execute what though?"
... yes. One of us is missing the point. It's probably me, but even if you're running a lawn care company there will be annoying details you have to get right. That's execution.
Perhaps it's more that we are looking at it from different levels. A contrived example to illuminate:
If I'm running a lawn care company in the desert I can get all those annoying details right and still be unsuccessful. So strategy is not opening a lawn care company in the desert.
If you think I'm missing something you are saying, please let me know!
Haha sure, that works. Or tailor your services for xeriscaping. The thing is, that's sufficiently obvious that it's not the kind of thing we're usually looking for when we talk about "strategy". Important, yes, but probably not what I was asking about.
So maybe there's "strategy" on the level of "sell something that non-zero people want", then there's execution on the details, and then a higher level of strategy that's maybe related to fine tuning product market fit, etc. But that feels like a weird discontinuity in "strategy" along the priority axis, and definitely doesn't fit with the conventional tone of "strategic thinking", which is definitely more on the "higher" level end of that spectrum.
What exactly did your work flow look like for the gpt-5-medium refactor you did?
I don't have a test like that on hand so I'm really curious what all you prompted the model, what it suggested, and how much your knowledge as a SWE enabled that workflow.
I'd like a more concrete understanding if the mind blowing nature is attainable for any average SWE, an average Joe that tinkers, or only a top decile engineer.
4. buying out or building feature parity with competitors that took FB from its IPO market share of $104 billion to today's market cap of $1.89 trillion.
Has he innovated successfully since the o.g. thefacebook? Not really. Metaverse fell flat on its face. Hardware efforts over two decades have gained no meaningful traction. AI is a mess.
Let me give the now defunct Internet History Podcast a shout out. Episode 100 - The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates? The Gary Kildall Story
A story with intrigue that chronicles the why and how Microsoft ended up extracting the most value from the PC revolution instead of the hardware makers and of course, why that was DOS instead of CP/M.
I liked the oral history nature of this podcast, walking me through things that preceded me in technology, and then things that I lived through like the 90's internet.
I remember watching a documentary. IBM officials showed up at Kildall's house twice to convince him to sell/license CP/M to them. Pre-planned meetings. He ghosted them both times. One of those times they waited hours for him.
There's a lot of mythology around Kildall and IBM. I'm sure some it it even aligns with the facts but I don't put that much stock in many of the stories and theories.
Past some point, even people with some first-hand knowledge may not know the whole truth, filter things through their own biases, may just misremember, etc.
My dad kept a diary during his combat tour in WW2. Decades later, he read it and was shocked to discover that it did not quite line up with his memories.
When I prepared a "history of D" for a paper a while back, I went looking through all my documents and emails and the D forum history looking to pin things down. I, too, discovered that my memories didn't match the facts as well as I wished it did.
Memory is a funny thing.
One should always be skeptical of accounts written long after the fact. I sometimes wonder how much of our written history is false. I support statutes of limitations because of this.
Beat for beat what has happened in Ohio. Same for enshrining abortion rights in our state constitution. The state legislature is hostile to the will of the people.
When I watched the video I had the subtitles on. The automatic transcript is pretty good. "Test-time" which is used frequently gets translated as "Tesla" so watch out for that.
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