Benji Weber
Tech Leader & Software Engineer • Tech and Teams, Extreme Programming, Java • CTO & Co-founder @ Geordie.ai • Previously Snyk, Unruly • Writes things at benjiweber.com/blog
- #London things
- Reposted by Benji WeberNew blog post on the high costs of coordination and the implications for large organizations: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/24/b...
- Reposted by Benji WeberOoh. Ollama just released Anthropic API impersonation, meaning you can set the endpoint to a local port and be off to the races! docs.ollama.com/integrations...
- Shame that @intellijidea.com can't complete this refactoring itself. Not ideal that the refactoring takes compiling code and creates code that fails to compile. #java
- Trying to identify this bird. LLMs like insisting it's various varieties of Californian bird but this is taken in Scotland. White Tailed Eagle? Buzzard? Osprey?
- It was at this moment I realised that slick tyres may not have been the optimal choice this morning #cycling
- Sea otter
- It's not bad out
- Reposted by Benji WeberAnd we're back. Again! Happy Holiday Trek 2025. 🎄🖖🏻🎄 #HolidayCombs www.youtube.com/watch?v=26H_...
- Reposted by Benji WeberI wrote a post about why I don't like the name that Amazon uses for their post-incident review process: "Correction of Error". surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/20/w...
- I want to see daylight again, Gandalf, daylight.
- Discovered there's a setting to change #intellij 's default infuriating behaviour of opening seemingly random tab when you drag/split editor views. I really wonder why "Most recently opened tab" is not the default.
- I like parameterised tests but find #junit 's EnumSource/MethodSource etc dissatisfying. Here's how you can parameterize tests with #java records gist.github.com/benjiman/e9f...
- Today I'm grumpy at Chrome putting "split view" where open in new window has been in every browser, building muscle memory for decades…for a feature that everyone's window manager already has.
- Reposted by Benji WeberAnd here’s an excellent post on how to apply them (most of this is not Ruby-specific): obie.medium.com/ruby-was-rea...
- Reposted by Benji WeberHilarious and terrifying: jailbreak LLMs using poetry "These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols." arxiv.org/html/2511.15...
- SUVs in London are really getting out of hand.
- Reposted by Benji WeberTDD is more important than ever
- Reposted by Benji WeberThe most common things engineering leaders think will make dev teams go faster actually have the opposite effect. codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/11/13/t...
- Microsoft: Operation failed, X is unlicensed, good luck figuring out what licence you need, (won't be called X). Google: Operation failed, you've hit a hard quota, good luck contacting a human to fix. Amazon: Everything worked, but good luck figuring out why you're paying 10x what you expected.
- Wish people would stop trying to use their user-agent based guess as to which OS I want a download link for, to remove all other options from the page and/or show a "not supported" page. It's tiresome having to keep changing user agent to get the right downloads.
- "we didn't actually have a good idea, we had the freedom to actually spend time and go and work on it, and even more importantly, we didn't have any pressure that was coming down from management, No pressure to work on any particular project, publish a number of papers to push a certain metric up."
- Llion Jones, co-author of the 2017 paper that launched the transformer era, says he’s ‘absolutely sick’ of transformers — and believes the field’s over-fixation on one architecture may be stifling the next breakthrough. venturebeat.com/ai/sakana-ai...
- Reposted by Benji WeberIt turns out techniques used by top software engineering teams help accelerate coding agents as well: Version control, documentation, careful planning, automated tests, linters, strong code review culture, really thorough QA Sophisticated processes for professional engineers
- The trouble with these electronic wing mirrors on buses now is one can't see if the bus driver is paying attention when #cycling. Why wouldn't the bus driver be paying attention you ask?
- I'm not sure this email marketing was targeted at engineers.
- Reposted by Benji WeberVery cool and good to see that Discord have leaked a bunch of people’s IDs that they were forced to send in when automated age verification failed. It’s a shame nobody predicted this extremely obvious outcome of the OSA. ID fraudsters will have a field day!
- `if(true) throw new RuntimeException();` Probably my most typed line of Java.
- Reposted by Benji WeberUnit tests are one of the fastest and cheapest ways to not only validate your work, but to stop regressions (and hallucinations!) If it doesn't compile or if the tests don't pass: it's *definitely* broken!
- Oh good, It has infected the devtools now.
- Reposted by Benji WeberNew blog post on the trade-offs of fine-grained progressive rollouts surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/09/13/t...
- oh: oh good, you're back, I don't need to ask Claude this
- There are worse morning commutes #cycling
- Reposted by Benji Weberrealistic Star Trek
- Top trolling by YouTube.
- Reposted by Benji WeberChatGPT, create a new Holmes-type mystery with an adversary capable of defeating Data.
- Reposted by Benji WeberOh wow, Rust 1.89 finally allows let f = format_args!("hello {name}!"); Such a simple-looking thing, but a long time coming. github.com/rust-lang/ru...
- Tired: Flying cars Wired: Flying bicycles
- Predictable results with the new Tulip cycle lanes.
- Reposted by Benji Weber- Tried to use this to stop teams rejecting suggestions “because this is not well specified” A PM at this company told me this story. Asked him if this LLM helped break the deadlock? His response: “No. We’re still stuck. But it was good excuse to play around with vector databases!” Ha.
- Building with Agents reminds me of the Greg Lemond quote "it never gets easier, you just go faster"
- Reposted by Benji WeberThis thread is incredible.
- Intellij referencing Star Trek.
- Reposted by Benji WeberAt its heart, Star Trek is a utopian fantasy about a society so advanced that they are capable of holding productive meetings that last no longer than three minutes
- Blog: The pace of change for development teams feels higher than ever. XP's tactics for helping teams embrace change are more relevant than ever • Help people; help the genies • Do more with less… money, not resilience • Discontinuous learning sustains the pace benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2025/07...
- Reposted by Benji WeberBonus blog post for today, about the underappreciated value of the "what went well" section of an incident report: “What went well” is more than just a pat on the back surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/06/14/w...
- Reposted by Benji Weberit’s hard to think of a historical precedent for wildly helpful technology degrading like this the only thing i can think of is when they forgot how to prevent scurvy (twice) but the impact size of that was still so small by comparison
- Reposted by Benji WeberIf candidates are cheating your interview process by using AI, the solution is not to quiz them on computer science topics. It's to pair with them and watch them cook! If they can cheat with AI better than you can, hire them.
- Time for the monthly cable replacement #thanksshimano
- Reposted by Benji Weberwhen you open a service you've been using for a decade only to find it out it caught the virus
- Github has got Gemini disease of popping up offering Copilot "help" in front of whatever you're trying to read or click on. Doesn't seem to matter how many times you dismiss it.
- A great thing about cycling [with appropriate clothing] is that in the winter cycling faster warms you up, and in the summer cycling faster cools you down.
- Reposted by Benji WeberWorth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.
- Reposted by Benji WeberI like this take by @kentbeck on how AI-assisted programming changes the balance of which skills are most important From this interview with @gergelyorosz newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tdd-ai-agents-and…
- Reposted by Benji WeberWhen the DORA report says good things about TBD, it's evidence that TBD is a critical practice in high-performing teams. When it says bad things, it's evidence that DORA had bad data, and was accidentally looking at LOW-performing teams. Trust the science until it says something you don't like!
- > Out of eight tests, seven passed while one test failed, indicating that most fixes were successful but further adjustments are needed for the remaining issue. My dear agent, I only gave you one failing test to implement.
- Give Junie a failing test case with nice diagnostics. Does it run it? No. It guesses the implementation first and then runs the tests. But does the implementation work? Also no.
- One of the most frustrating things with Android Chrome is how you: • Open a link in chrome • Switch to something else • Go back to chrome -> It shows you what you wanted to continue reading for a split second, only for it to vanish into the ether, never to be seen again.
