I’m taking a break from my normal content this week because JetBrains have just released an early access preview of their AI Assistant, and I wanted to be the first to make a video on it!

As luck would have it, I needed to make a diagram of the package structure of the Gilded Rose codebase, and I couldn’t find anything in the IntelliJ menus, so I thought that I’d see if AI assistant could help.

By the way, to access the tool, you need to download IDEA 2023.2 EAP, and log in to the AI service - details are here https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2023/06/ai-assistant-in-jetb... There seems to be a bit of a waiting list, so I hope that this isn’t too much of a tease if you don’t get access straight away.

And as a blog series

http://oneeyedmen.com/failure-is-not-an-option-part-1.html

This. Not the speculative builds thing, but the organising your codebase so that you don’t have this problem.

Our code structure needs to support both the functionality required by our customers, and our needs as developers.

This reminds me that because array access is just addition, in C you can also write 2[a] to access the third element of a.

In the same timescales I was thinking the same thing, but in particular recording the conversation between pair programmers.

OneNote had (has?) a mode where you could click on sections of a meeting note and hear the audio from the time the text was written.

Extend that to an IDE and every time you found yourself saying “what were they thinking when they wrote this?” you could listen in on the conversation and find out.

Does oneOf not cover it?

oneOf looks like it could be used to encode sum types together with a custom string tag, but that's not the first class treatment that records get.

Mark (https://mark.js.org) is a new notation that extends JSON with a type-name, which can be a more structured way to encode type info, instead of using custom string tag.

My interpretation:

He said "I'm not going to take a penny more [than 10%] from you."

They heard "I'm not going to take a penny more [than all the money I have already taken] from you."

They were too polite to press the case once the misunderstanding became apparent.

And thanks for the downvote, keep making sure no good deed goes unpunished.

Just for the record - that wasn't me.

Is this confusion just so that we can ask the type of a nil interface value at runtime?

A man orders coffee in a restaurant.

"Would you like it with or without cream?"

"Without"

A few minutes later the waiter returns.

"I'm sorry sir, we've run out of cream. Would you like it without milk instead?"

I'm confused. I don't think this is a JVM - it doesn't load and exectute byte-code at runtime. So is it a cross-compiler to C with a runtime that manages GC?

Its an AOT compiler which does qualify as a JVM of sort. It takes Java bytecode and allows you to run it which is really the main "concept" of the JVM. It includes a GC and the basic semantics of the Java language (e.g. like GWT).

I've been pair-programming for over 15 years now, and was introduced to mobbing by Woody and Llewellyn a couple of years ago. I've tried it in a couple of teams for specific tasks. I don't think that in a team of experienced devs I would mob all the time (although if the team wanted to I wouldn't veto it), but it definitely has its place. In particular for learning new techniques, large refactorings and exploring solutions with customers.