In this barnstorming episode of What A Lot Of Things, Ian and Ash bravely venture into the uncanny valley of AI pair programming, where the machines are suspiciously eager to agree that you're an absolute genius. Will our intrepid hosts manage to navigate the delicate dance between genuine collaboration and what Ash describes as "an advanced rubber duck with impeccable manners"? (Spoiler: sort of!)

But wait, there's more! Just when you thought the AI world couldn't get more dramatic, enter DeepSeek R1, the plucky Chinese upstart that's got Silicon Valley clutching their very expensive pearls. Our hosts dive into this tale of hobbled chips and unexpected innovation, while simultaneously managing to reference municipal gas works, start taking over the monuments in Monument Valley, and establish the critical importance of saying "What A Lot Of Things" in hardware stores across the nation.

Plus, hear all about the wildly successful What A Lot Of Things Christmas party, where actual listeners crossed actual Pennines to join our heroes for what we can only describe as an evening of unparalleled podcast-based revelry.

Links

• Thoughtworks Tech Radar on Replacing Pair Programming with AI
• Thoughtworks Memo: Coding assistants do not replace pair programming
• Useful coding helpers in the form of Claude, OpenAI o1, and v0.dev.
• Also, OpenAI's o3 announcement (dated before recording) and o3-mini release (dated after)
• Baldur's Gate 3
• Youtube: Brian Eno – January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now (2003, Full Album)
• The shadcn/ui component library
• Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch 2, with all-new Mario Kart
• OpenAI o1 System Card and Apollo Research: Frontier Models are Capable of
  In-context Scheming.
• Github: DeepSeek R1
• Simon Willison: DeepSeek-R1 and exploring DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B
• nVidia Project DIGITS, allowing you to run models locally of only 200b parameters.

Step into a quantum realm of confusion as Ian attempts to explain Google's new Willow chip, a computer so powerful it makes regular supercomputers look like pocket calculators from the 1980s. Listen in amazement as our hosts try to wrap their heads around quantum computing using everything from Schrödinger's cat to hand-waving explanations of mysterious "quantum gates" that may or may not be Bill Gates' cooler brother.

But wait! Just when you thought your brain couldn't take any more, Ash whisks us back to the glory days of rubber keyboards and screeching cassette tapes. Relive the high-stakes drama of typing in magazine code listings where one wrong character could spell DISASTER, and discover why modern gaming just isn't quite the same without the constant threat of losing everything when your RAM pack wobbles.

Plus: Ian's lightning-fast speaking adventures, Ash's suspiciously unopened Christmas present, and the eternal quest to explain why testing isn't just something you do at the end (even when Ian looks really, really attentive).

Links

• Google Blog: Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip
• Jill Platts' Medium article: A Quantum Programming Quest for Newbies with 10 Use Cases
• Photo of a quantum computer
• Leeds Testing Atelier, back in 2025!
• Ian's presentation about his podcasting life
• The Guardian: The Spectrum review – a tactile trip to the 1980s
• Metro: Retro video games are a waste of everyone’s time and money – Reader’s Feature
• Capcom Edition Super Pocket with its 12 highly acclaimed arcade games from the Japanese publisher
• Ian's YouTube hit: 3d Monster Maze on the Sinclair Timex ZX81
• DECTalk sings "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" by Tom Lehrer
• Granny's Garden on the BBC Micro, featuring a beepy version of Irish fiddle tune The Rights of Man (this one on an actual fiddle)

Your favorite tech podcast stretches out for a luxurious 75 minutes this time, like a cat in a sunbeam (speaking of which, meet Ash's new rescue cat Bauhaus).

Ian and Ash dive into McKinsey's latest thoughts on measuring developer productivity, leading to some choice words about their take on "quality assurance testers." Things get wonderfully weird when Ian introduces the Clock of the Long Now - a 10,000-year timepiece being built inside a Texas mountain, complete with never-repeating chimes and powered by temperature differences between day and night.

Fresh from running 100km at God's Own Backyard Ultra (where you run a loop every hour until you can't), Ash contemplates the value of doing things slowly in our rush-rush world. Ian makes a triumphant return to public speaking with an AI talk (using the intriguing IA Presenter), and recommends The Bear - a stressful but compelling show about a high-stakes restaurant kitchen that might just teach us something about team dynamics. Yes chef!

Links

• Why embracing complexity is the real challenge in software today
• DORA’s software delivery metrics: the four keys
• The SPACE of Developer Productivity
• Yes, you can measure software developer productivity
• Wikipedia: Goodhart's Law
• God's Own Backyard Ultra 2024 – Results
• Bauhaus - the movement, not the band.
• IA Writer and IA Presenter
• Ian's talk: Enhancing Team Effectiveness with AI: A Squadify Case Study and Squadify where Ian is CTO
• The Bear
• The Clock of the Long Now, and the prototype in the Science Museum in London
• The Long Now Foundation and Danny Hillis
• Svalbard Global Seed Vault
• Utopia for Realists–the book Ash couldn't remember the title of.