Picture Me Coding

In this episode we discuss a couple of recent papers on just-in-time development and agentic systems and how we think they suggest trends that will affect software development for years to come.  We boldly predict that in 2046 people will still not want robot dentists.
The Time is Here for Just-in-Time Systems: Challenges and Opportunities
MDASH: The MS Security Thing 
Services: The New Software | Sequoia Capital
Understanding Spec-Driven-Development: Kiro, spec-kit, and Tessl

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For the 100th episode of Picture Me Coding we talk about numbers.  Mike talks about his favorite numbers, Erik talks about his favorite ports, and we discuss the surprising phenomenon of Benford's Law.

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This week we were joined by our friend Doug Burke, who runs a company and has been working on his "digital life workout partner", a voice-activated LLM tool. Doug's story is interesting because he does not have a background in software development, and we wanted to learn more about what he's building.
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In this episode we invite back our friend Bob Farzin to discuss our personal experiences with using teams of agents to write software, and we try to parse out the experiences we're seeing on the interwebs, including Steve Yegge's GasTown and Wes McKinney's discussion of agentic development in the context of Brooks's _Mythical Man Month_.
"Introducing Beads: A coding agent memory system"
Welcome to Gas Town — Steve Yegge's original essay
The Future of Coding Agents — Yegge's follow-up
Gas Town on GitHub — The actual tool
How to Think About Gas Town — Steve Klabnik's analysis
A Day in Gas Town — DoltHub's practical walkthrough
Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development — Software Engineering Daily interview with Yegge
Top Coding Agents 2025 — Benched.ai comparison guide
[April 8, Wes McKinney] AI Agents, The Mythical Agent Month, My Wild AI Coding Setup

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In this episode we attempt to explain query optimization and where it came from.  In particular we discuss Patricia Selinger's 1979 SIGMOD paper Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System. 
Access Path Selection paper (PDF)
A Conversation with Pat Selinger — ACM Queue (2006)
Database Dialogue with Pat Selinger — CACM (2008)
Pat Selinger Speaks Out — SIGMOD Interview (PDF)
Patricia Selinger — IBM History
System R: Database Research Retrospective — TODS 1981
Graefe, G. (1995). The Cascades Framework for Query Optimization 
Leis et al. (2015). How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really? PVLDB Vol. 9 — introduces the Join Order Benchmark (JOB) and empirically audits modern optimizers.

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