1 post published by codemanship during October 2025| Codemanship's Blog
An interesting piece of research was published recently that found that the effective maximum context size of Large Language Models is orders of magnitude smaller than the advertised maximum contex…| Codemanship's Blog
3 posts published by codemanship during July 2025| Codemanship's Blog
This is the second post in a series that aims to pseudo-formalise the workflow of Test-Driven Development by describing the “rules” of TDD using pseudocode. As I discussed in my first post on Usage-Driven Design, I’ll be aiming to express workflow declaratively, so order is implied rather than imperatively hardwired. (Instead of “boil the kettle, … Continue reading "TDD Under The Microscope #2 – Assert First"| Codemanship's Blog
We’re back to this old chestnut. In one of the exercises on my Code Craft course called “The CD Warehouse”, one of the use cases is that customers can buy a CD from the warehouse. The most common design solution is to add something like a buyCD(artist, title, card) method to a Warehouse class. And, … Continue reading "What Are The “Objects” in “Object-Oriented Programming”?"| Codemanship's Blog
This is the first part in a series of posts where I’m going to try to crystallise my ideas about how TDD really works, ideally expressed pseudo-formally (with pseudocode). Workflow Linting. Like Code Linting, Only The Same. It’s part of an ongoing side-project to create what I’ve provisionally titled a “workflow linter”. Many of us … Continue reading "TDD Under The Microscope #1 – Usage-Driven Design"| Codemanship's Blog
Code reviews? Let me tell you about code reviews! To me, a code review done by people is exploratory testing. We gather around a piece of code (e.g., a merge diff for a new feature). We go through the code and we ask ourselves “What do we think of this?” Maybe we see a method … Continue reading "Code Reviews as Exploratory Testing"| Codemanship's Blog
I’ve joked in the past that what really makes LLMs work is our tendency to see faces on toast, but there’s a more serious point there about how much of our perception of the ability of models to “understand”, “reason”, “follow instructions” etc is in reality projection. We’ve evolved to read intention into the behaviour … Continue reading "Clever Hans Couldn’t Really Do Arithmetic, and LLMs Don’t Really Understand."| Codemanship's Blog
Going through the practices that many software developers report improve the results they get with “A.I.” coding assistants – the ones I’ve managed to reproduce myself. * Small, task-specific prompts – solve one problem at a time, reconstruct context for the next task (only what the model needs to know) * Prompting with tests/usage examples … Continue reading "eXtreme Programming Reborn: Code Craft & “A.I.”"| Codemanship's Blog
With the long-awaited and much anticipated launch yesterday of the mythical GPT-5, and observing the widespread disappointment that it isn’t just not the superintelligence we were promised, but it’s barely an improvement on previous ‘frontier’ models, I wanted to revisit my blog post from January 11th so I could enjoy the delicious satisfaction of saying … Continue reading "The LLM In The Room: ChatGPT Speaks"| Codemanship's Blog
When most software developers are asked about productivity, one thing that often gets mentioned is interruptions. We perceive ourselves to be more productive when we can maintain a deep state of concentration (“flow”) for extended periods, and interruptions break that flow. They may cite research that shows that it can take 15-20 minutes to get … Continue reading "Micro-Iterations, Maps & “Interruptibility”"| Codemanship's Blog
In my early 20s, I went to Inverness with a group of friends for a long weekend. On the looong journey up, we became obsessed with finding the Loch Ness monster, and ultimately had no fun when we w…| Codemanship's Blog
Founder of Codemanship Ltd and code craft coach and trainer| Codemanship's Blog
7 posts published by codemanship during September 2025| Codemanship's Blog
An effect that’s being more and more widely reported is the increase in time it’s taking developers to modify or fix code that was generated by Large Language Models. If you’ve wo…| Codemanship's Blog