The One Where We Geek Out on Vibe Coding with Jean-Mark Wright

Key takeaways:

• Kids take new tech for granted. For example, carriers used to charge by the minute for calls. Text and web browsing were extra (and extra expensive).
• Configuring Linux back in the day was 1 part fun, 10 parts pain.
• Watching things on video allows us to see expressions and hear intonations that you would otherwise miss with text. With text, you would have to imagine that for yourself.
• Being able to take a problem and break it down into first principles allows you to look at a problem from different angle, pulling on your experience and the experiences of others to solve those components and put the layers back on to form a solution.
• Many of today's paradigms are just variants of problems that we've seen before, just masquerading with different names.
• If we break down a problem enough, we actually start to see examples of how similar problems have been solved.
• Breaking down a problem into a way that someone outside of your area of work can understand teaches you to break a problem down into understandable bits and helps you understand the problem better.
• It's easy to think you understand something. But as soon as you try to try to explain that to someone else, it forces you to dig deeper.
• Understanding things from first principles gives us a better understanding of how things work.
• WIth vibe coding, junior engineers don't get to experience more traditional debugging (i.e. with Google). Is that good or bad?
• Problem solving loop: come up with a hypothesis, test it out, and if the test fails, come up with another hypothesis, and keep repeating that loop until the problem is solved. Juniors these days aren't necessarily exposed to that.
• Debugging with LLMs shortens feedback loops.
• Junior engineers, not having been through the "old way" of debugging with Google and StackOverflow may be tempted to view LLMs as an authority.
• Maybe it makes sense to just give into All The AI things and retrain ourselves to coexist with AI.
• Encode best practices in LLM rules files to help guide junior developers
• Style guides can be enforced through instructions files
• Mentoring + style guides + other guardrails can help junior engineers level up
• Pre-AI-era engineers and AI-native engineers can learn a lot from each other

About our guest:

Jean-Mark is a builder at heart, driven by a passion for creating sustainable architecture, fostering strong teams, and championing Observability.

He has dedicated his career to building across various disciplines with a keen focus on creating systems that are both fit for purpose and built to last. Jean-Mark’s journey into Observability began from a practical challenge: the difficulty of understanding complex production systems at scale. This sparked a deep passion for designing and implementing solutions that provide clarity and insight into these systems.

A natural leader, Jean-Mark is as invested in people as he is in technology. He has brought many others along on his journey, mentoring and training colleagues in best practices and making countless tooling improvements to enhance system visibility across the organization. This commitment to both technical excellence and people development has made a lasting impact. At his core, Jean-Mark is still a builder who finds great joy in investing in people and engaging in endless conversations about all things Observability.

Find Jean-Mark on:

• LinkedIn
• Blog

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela

Links:

• Adriana's blog post born out of one of her chat's on LinkedIn with Jean-Mark
• Symbian operating system (mobile phones)
• Sony Ericsson
• Nokia 3310
• LG Chocolate phone
• BlackBerry Curve
• Nokia phone case meme
• GPRS
• CDMA
• TDMA
• Observability Engineering book
• Anthropic AI fluency course