Now is the time to rethink engineering productivity

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:10)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:12)
Before we actually get started on this week's news, you might have noticed a new icon for Dev Interrupted on wherever you're listening to us today. That's right, Dev Interrupted has undergone a quick rebrand. We have some new visuals representing us out in the internet world. So if you see a different icon, a different header image, even different photos for our guests that come onto the show, just know that's part of our audience growing, evolving, us listening to our community and updating our visuals.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:39)
AI is changing everything. It's changed the Linear B brand too. No, I joke. We've been using the same designs for quite a while.
And I imagine long time listeners and sub stack subscribers out there have probably noticed, like you mentioned, the new icon. We've got a new color scheme on our sub stack. Just a whole bunch of updated visuals for everything that we publish. But don't worry, this is mostly a visual refresh. We just felt it was time to give a facelift to Dev Interrupted and just make it a little sharper, a little more 2025, I guess, for lack of a better way to describe it. I'm not a designer.

**Andrew Zigler** (1:15)
Yes, no, we did not design it. We entrusted it to the skills of a talented designer who made it. And we're excited. It has a lot of black and white themes. And actually, I just realized today, I'm totally twinning with our new branding because I'm wearing black and white. So definitely check it out and listen to what you think.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:30)
Yeah, yeah, and absolutely. And you absolutely don't want me designing this either because it would be the absolute worst design.

**Andrew Zigler** (1:37)
But we talk about engineering news. We don't design podcast free brands.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:40)
Yeah, but I want to point out that Dev Interrupted Linear B, we have this very close relationship. Linear B has this wealth of data and research within the organization that we love tapping into. Whereas on the Dev Interrupted side, we have this incredible community of engineering leaders. And what we're really trying to do, like sort of behind the scenes, as this visual refresh is happening, is really to leverage both sides of that equation a little bit better. So be on the lookout for new types of content from us, from deeper content that gets really deep into research and into the opinions of our experts. I think a really great example of this, and we'll mention this a little bit later, but we've got this really cool workshop coming out tomorrow about how organizations are moving beyond Copilot-style AI tools to do more AI-driven software development. We've got some incredible research from Linear B, but then also some really fantastic past guests from Dev Interrupted that are going to join us to share their expertise on it. So moving forward, the brand is updated. We're still going to be the same. The content is mostly going to follow the same structure we've always followed. But just keep an eye out for additional new content opportunities, new research and new types of material coming out of us. So there is a little bit of changing on the back end, but for now, it's mostly just a visual refresh. And we hope you all like it. Let us know what you think on LinkedIn.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:03)
Yeah. And with that out of the way, let's move on to some of this week's industry news, because we have a really cool roundup of some interesting topics people were talking about this week in software engineering. One of them is a recent agentic AI primer doc that dropped from an expert in the field who we've also covered in the past. We have an update on how he's thinking about agentic coding. We have an article about why pen and paper is still a developer's best friend. In the round things out, we're looking at some of the modern forms that shadow IT is taking. So Ben, what do you want to dive into first?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:34)
Well, it's a little refreshing to have AI content being in the minority this week, because that hasn't happened in quite a while. So maybe we just get that out of the way. Let's start there.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:43)
Okay. Well, then let's dive into this really cool article from Pete Hodgson about why your AI coding assistant keeps doing things wrong and ultimately how to fix it.
This is a primer that outlines some of the type of tasks that folks are using agentic tools in the coding environment to work on software, right? And using an LLM in your IDE can take a lot of different forms, and the questions that you can ask it really vary depending on your own expertise level and what you're trying to accomplish and how complex your code base is. So this article, it offers a nuanced perspective on some of the more polarized discussions around using AI assisted coding in this way. Is it good? Is it bad? And ultimately, what it boils down to is it's good at certain things, and it's bad at other things. You know, this is asking your LLM to spell strawberry all over again. It's important that you're using your tools in a way that they're best set up to give you success. So he introduced this idea called a constraint content context matrix, categorizes tasks on axes. If you've been following our content, we love mapping things out on graphs and axes in terms of adoption. So we're going to include some links on this coverage. I myself have been talking a bit with Pete. We'd love to probably have him on the podcast in the future. So stay tuned because we're going to really dive into the evolution of agentic coding space. Ben, what did you think?