Code Quality leader from the mountains, working @SonarSource. When there's no learning there's no fun.
around Gex
Joined May 2010
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benzonico retweeted
Just wanted to defend the term "Software Factory" for a second.
First, the caveats:
It's bullshit. It sounds fancier than it really is.
It's a bandwagon. People are using it to get you and their VC's hyped.
But it's also referring to a real change.
Earlier this year, most SOTA teams were using agents to work on the product. Shipping features, fixing bugs.
But now, they're building automations to help agents work on the product for them. They've moved up a layer.
What do we call the thing they're building? Loops? Workflows? Some other generic label?
"Software Factory" is as good a term as any other.
- "We're not working on the product, we're working on the factory that builds the product."
- "We're not product engineers, we're factory engineers."
I like it. I'll continue using it.
benzonico retweeted
Strange for me to say but if you have an SDK and it doesn't start onboarding with this kind of "copy a prompt for your agent to set it up" it's unlikely your SDK will see rapid adoption
This is from Jev
The "best practices" for software changed very fast
benzonico retweeted
We need to reconsider our priors on code readability.
Humans, compared to agents, are pretty slow at understanding large quantities of text. So in the old days, readability was important so the human could efficiently grok what was going on.
So readability now comes down to:
1. Can a human, if needed, jump in and understand the code
2. Does the code use the same domain language as the human describing the code?
1 helps with observability and the occasional spot checks you need to do on important PR's. 2 helps the agent translate the words you use into code changes.
In other words, readability is now a nicety, not a necessity.
The way agents 'read' code is different - good agents are all about gathering data about how the code works. They'll prod around with it, execute parts of it.
So 'readability' to agents really means 'verifiability'. How easy it is to mess about with that code to see it working.
Let's take this scenario:
- You have a huge module in your codebase that uses all sorts of complex performance tricks
- It has 100% test coverage
A talented human would need an hour or two to get comfortable working in that module.
An agent needs zero time. They verify it with the tests, poke about a bit, and they're good to go.
The takeaways:
- When judging a module (or a codebase), don't think about how easy the code is to read
- Instead, think about how easy it is to verify
- Design your codebase so modules can be tested and verified independently
- Feel free to sacrifice a bit of readability for performance
- Cyclomatic complexity and function size don't matter to agents
benzonico retweeted
At Datadog, the founders were almost religious in this belief. To the point of vetoing offers on this basis, even when we’d scaled well past 1000 employees
The remarkable thing was how much this was fought at every layer below the founders. Everyone wanted an exception.
The founders correctly pointed out that short tenures were correlated with being better at interviewing than at the job itself, and therefore there’d always be enormous pressure to relax the rules for seemingly exceptional candidates that were actually just exceptional interviewers.
Amazing work by @antonio_aversa and the research team at @SonarSource
Your coding agent reads the same 600 lines 400 times. In a large codebase, a shell-based agent can only move one way: grep. This article shows how Sonar Vortex uses SemSitter™, our semantic navigation engine, to cut that waste. cc: @sonar_research
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I rest my case. We are relearning everything from the 2010 in a couple of years
And this is exactly why “SaaS replaced by AI coded software” is not viable for any company that has a an ACTUAL business.
It’s a fun exercise to rebuild ticketing/o11y/feature flags etc… but do you really want to maintain it? Do you want updates, oncall etc to be YOUR problem??
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benzonico retweeted
AI coding assistants help teams ship code faster, and that speed can hide vulnerabilities SAST doesn't catch. The SonarQube Hunter Agent, now in Beta, targets vulnerability classes that are most common in AI-generated code.
Read the announcement: sonarsource.com/blog/hunter-…
benzonico retweeted
Your AI coding agents ship fast. Can your governance keep up?
In our next webinar, we'll break down how Sonar Vortex catches issues inside the agent's own loop, & the SonarQube Remediation Agent fixes existing issues before they pile up.
Save your spot: events.sonarsource.com/agent…
benzonico retweeted
From a Head of Engineering who spent a week in SF, meeting a bunch of AI startups:
"When I was back, I wrote a memo about my impressions. The #1 was how these amazing startups I met: they mostly did not have a business. But we do.
So be VERY careful in copying what they do. It's easy to act all confident that doing X or Y is "the" way to do things, when your business is spending more money every month than what you generate, as you are searching for what your business will actually be.
It's a different game when you have a business like us, and we're searching for how we can make it either bigger, or more efficient."
benzonico retweeted
Sonar Vortex's new graph navigation engine cut coding agent usage cost up to 36% per run, across Java, Python, TypeScript, and C#.
Here's the technical breakdown of what's behind it 🧵
sonarsource.com/blog/cut-you…
benzonico retweeted
🎤 Sonar CEO @tariqshaukat takes the @aiDotEngineer World's Fair mainstage Wednesday, July 1 at 9:25am PT.
His keynote, "In the Land of AI Agents, the Verifiers Are King," makes the case that verification, not generation, is where the agentic era gets won. Don’t miss it!
benzonico retweeted
1/ Software architectures erode over time. AI accelerates this, with agents writing functionally correct code that silently crosses architectural boundaries they can't see.
Learn how to map, define, and enforce your architecture in SonarQube Cloud 🧵
sonarsource.com/resources/li…
benzonico retweeted
"Big companies' products is rotting faster than ever... but even startups' [products are rotting faster than ever.]"
It's such a head-scratcher how nearly everyone has forgotten about the importance of quality, thanks to AI agents.
Product quality comes from doing irrational things. Dax Raad(@thdxr), creator of OpenCode, on how quality is a constant practice, not a decision:
“It's easier than ever to rot your product, with these agents and everything.
You see it with big companies. Big companies' products are rotting faster than ever. Even startups' products. Now if a product is a year old, it's probably already kind of going to shit. And I think it's because of all these agent workflows.
I still believe quality is a huge differentiator. It's not just something you can decide to do. I think it needs to show up in every single aspect of your company. You have to do things that are irrational.
Even if you look at our story: when we first launched OpenCode, ClaudeCode was the only other real thing we were going up against and a big initial differentiator was that our terminal experience just felt better.
We built our own terminal framework. Building your own framework is the first thing they tell you not to do, right? It's the thing that no engineering team should do.
It's irrational, but we looked at it and we're like, we couldn't achieve the experience we wanted."
benzonico retweeted
SonarQube CLI is generally available today‼️
We're bringing multilayered code verification into the agentic era. Secrets detection, code quality and security analysis, and dependency risk scanning, all through a single command line tool.
Details: sonarsource.com/blog/sonarqu…
benzonico retweeted
Sonar has acquired @gitarcode 🎸
Together, Sonar and Gitar will cover AI code verification from pull request to production, delivering the most complete answer to how enterprises move fast with AI without breaking things. Learn more: bit.ly/3RikLKN
benzonico retweeted
In an industry built on determinism, I feel we might be underestimating the work we all will need to do with LLMs exactly because they are nondeterministic.
But for so much of automation/workflows, determinism (aka "make sure it doesn't make a mistake") is a baseline expectation
benzonico retweeted
OK, this is not April fool's: Anthripic seems to be issuing mass DMCA requests on code that are legit forks of Anthropic's own (open!) "claude code" repo
This is looking terrible on Anthropic. Btw it's also breaking of the law to file a DMCA on something that never broke it
benzonico retweeted
... or sacrifice quality. Or performance. Or maintainability. Or anything that us devs would call "non-functional requirements." The stuff that is invisible on first glance... until it's not, and makes the difference between a product users love, and one they hate
Seems we are going to go through the learnings of the 2005-2015 decade in the year 26-27...
Cannot wait for teams that build their custom JIRA/Workday replacement/custom CRM to one day turn around and ask:
“Why do we have so much internal software that is buggy / has poor UX + we need to maitain?”
Seen this movie well before AI, when Uber built uChat (custom Slack)
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