What I’ve been reading this week ending 21 September 2025
Prompt Engineering Is Requirements Engineering — O’Reilly
“Prompt engineering and requirements engineering are literally the same skill — using clarity, context, and intentionality to communicate your intent and ensure what gets built matches what you actually need.”
Good cities can’t exist without public order
“We can try to simply yell at fearful NIMBYs to stop being a bunch of NIMBYs and call them racists and segregationists and petty landed gentry, but this approach historically has poor results. Instead, the country should address their concerns about violence and disorder, in order to build a constituency for urbanism in America. (And of course, needless to say, lowering crime and increasing public safety is good in and of itself.)”
You should be rewriting your prompts
“At least for now, models aren’t perfectly interchangeable. Prompts overfit to models the same way models overfit to data. If you’re switching models, rewrite your prompts. Test them. Probably eval them. Align them with the defaults of the new model instead of fighting against them. That’s how you get a good prompt.”
“Ultimately, a mature technology doesn’t look like magic; it looks like infrastructure. It gets smaller, more reliable, and much more boring.
We’re here to solve problems, not look cool.”
What is your “OK Zone?” — The Lean Thinker
“Anything between the defined process and “normal” and “acceptible” is in your “OK Zone” meaning, “This is OK,” I’m not going to take the time or energy to try to hold it up any higher.
If you want to know what your OK zone looks like, just walk around and look. It is what you see every day.”
Test state, not interactions | Redowan’s Reflections
“The general theme when writing unit tests should be checking the behavior of the system, not the scaffolding of its implementation. It doesn’t matter which method called which, how many times, or with what arguments.”
If all the world were a monorepo — Julie’s Substack
“…although the reality is messy, I believe CRAN’s is truly the right mindset for running migrations. It places you in a powerful state of extreme empathy — that our user’s code is our responsibility, and that their success is ours too.”
China is quietly saving the world from climate change
“…it’s crucial to remember that developing countries are buying all this green tech not because of morality, or even because of self-preservation (since whether they decarbonize or not has very little effect on global emissions). They’re buying all this green tech because it’s cheaper than fossil fuel tech.”
