Tux Machines
Programming Leftovers
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 13, 2025
SICP ☛ Is spec-driven development the end of Agile software development?
A claim that I’ve seen on software social media is that spec-driven development is evidence that agile was a dark path, poorly chosen. The argument goes that Agile software development is about eschewing detailed designs and specifications, in favour of experimentation and feedback. Spec-driven development shows that the way to unlock maximal productivity in augmented development (and therefore in development overall, as LLM agents can type faster than programmers can) is by writing detailed specifications for the code generator to follow. Therefore detailed specifications are valuable after all, so Agile was wrong to do away with them.
Let’s take a look at what’s going on in—and behind—this argument.
SusamPal ☛ I Fed 24 Years of My Blog Posts to a Markov Model
It is a very small program that favours simplicity over efficiency. As a hobby, I often engage in exploratory programming where I write computer programs not to solve a specific problem but simply to explore a particular idea or topic for the sole purpose of recreation. I must have written small programs to explore Markov chains for various kinds of state spaces over a dozen times by now. Every time, I just pick my last experimental code and edit it to encode the new state space I am exploring. That's usually my general approach to exploratory programming. I have hundreds of tiny little exploratory programs lying on my disk at any given time.
Rlang ☛ How to Assess Usage of your Package
As a package maintainer, you might want to get some numbers or impressions on the usage of your package for various reasons: getting some confirmation that your work is useful, prioritizing development on specific features of your software, helping justify a request for funding. Don’t get your hopes too high: there is no perfect solution nor measure. However, we will share some useful information sources in this post – many of them already used and displayed by R-Universe!
Yordi Verkroost ☛ Advent of Code 2025 - Day 12
We've made it! The North Pole has been decorated and Advent of Code 2025 is finished. But not before telling you something about what feels like the most dirty solution for a puzzle ever.
Ben Congdon ☛ The Coming Need for Formal Specification
In late 2022, I had a conversation with a senior engineer on the coming problem of “what to do when Hey Hi (AI) is writing most of the code”. His opinion, which I found striking at the time, was that engineers would transition from writing mostly “implementation” code, to mostly writing tests and specifications.
I remember thinking at the time that this was prescient. With three years of hindsight, it seems like things are trending in a different direction. I thought that the reason that testing and specifications would be useful was that Hey Hi (AI) agents would be struggling to “grok” coding for quite some time, and that you’d need to have robust specifications such that they could stumble toward correctness.
Adam Young: Qemu code format in vim
My defaults are set for GNU/Linux Kernel development, but I have been in Qemu land lately and these values make it easier to format.
Liam Proven ☛ What's the point of lightweight code with modern computers?
I think there are many.Some examples:* The fastest code is the code you don't run.Smaller = faster, and we all want faster. Moore's law is over, Dennard scaling isn't affordable any more, smaller feature sizes are getting absurdly difficult and therefore expensive to fab. So if we want our computers to keep getting faster as we've got used to over the last 40-50 years then the only way to keep delivering that will be to start ruthlessly optimising, shrinking, finding more efficient ways to implement what we've got used to.
Rlang ☛ Outreachy June 2025 Interns with Bioconductor
To a beginner, open source can be one of the best pathways into a fulfilling tech career. It not only provides access to source codes but also connects you with a global community of people from diverse backgrounds and skill sets.
Python
Linux Magazine ☛ Solus GNU/Linux 4.8 Removes Python 2
Solus GNU/Linux 4.8 has been released with the latest GNU/Linux kernel, updated desktops, and a key removal.
Chris Amico ☛ My Python setup, December 2025
I’m at the point where I’m migrating all my projects to uv, and new Python projects don’t use any other package manager.
I finally got around to migrating this site to use it, using the very handy migrate-to-uv tool. So it’s time to update my recommended Python setup.
Rust
eSecurity Planet ☛ Rust-Based 01flip Ransomware Hits Windows and Linux
Researchers identified new ransomware — called 01flip — that is a fully Rust-written, cross-platform threat deployed in targeted attacks against critical infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region.
The victims of the ransomware included “… organizations responsible for critical infrastructure in Southeast Asia,” said Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers.