I watched Lewboski’s video on becoming a Linux kernel contributor. I had stumbled upon the opportunity to contribute to the kernel a long time back, when I was about to join the Linux Foundation Mentorship Program, but I decided to contribute to a cloud networking project instead. Since then, I’ve always wanted to at least try to look under the hood and understand how these systems work in the lower levels.
One of the benefits of coding agents is that they can help you understand new codebases really well. There shouldn’t be anything stopping you, really, from learning and becoming better at your craft in the age of agents.
I’ve just started listening to Gergely’s interview with Peter Steinberger, the creator of Clawdbot. He is one person, operating like a company. I think in the later parts of the interview, he shares his agentic-engineering flow; maybe I will find something interesting to copy from him.
All this goes to show that software engineering is not about writing code but about understanding systems. Kernel contributors understand the underlying hardware deeply enough to improve it, and people like Peter understand their tools deeply enough to orchestrate them.
Ambaan is more proactive today. I gave it/him? complete access to my notes—years of data—and it/he? knows more about me now. I’m also guilty of using his power to blabber voice notes and have it/him? file my incomplete thoughts neatly.
What a time to be alive!