Aravindh Sridharan skips AI two days per week. He only uses it the other 5.
This sounds like a silly click bait joke, and it kind of is. It’s also just how Aravindh works - ever since I’ve known him (close to 20 years at this point) he’s had this intense work habit. I admire how he does it; he knows not to get too far ahead of his team mates, for instance - so me might spend 20 hours learning something new for fun, 20 hours on a side project (like the algorithmic trading bot he built), and only work 50 or so hours a week or so on his main job. All of this to say, setting down tools that make you arguably more productive 28% of the time is showing intense restraint - and I admire this about him, too. Aravindh swears by it - it helps him have a much better sense of the codebase that he and his GenAI tools are making. It also helps that he’s one of the best software developers I’ve ever worked with. He balances confidence, expertise and the openness of the “beginners mind” like no one I’ve known. The other thing he talked about in our interview makes new use of an existing axiom - that you should “own the seams”. In this interview, Aravindh argues that we should prioritize working closely with our GenAI tools to define REST interfaces, service contracts, classes, interfaces, traits and so on, and exert slightly less control over how it works between these seams. “Own the seams” often gets used when talking about systems integration; that if you use IBM’s Websphere Commerce (which has the shopping cart) and also Sterling’s Order Management System (which manages the order that the cart becomes), try to not let these two important packaged systems to talk directly to another. Even placing a thin shim of a proxy between them begins to give you some control - and better yet, place some kind of adapter between them to prevent Sterling from becoming aware of or dependent on Websphere Commerce’s internal domain jargon and vice versa. This particular use of owning the seams flips it on its head a little bit - instead of enterprise software teams placing domain facades between two massive packaged software systems in order to have more control, its you exerting control over your GenAI coding tools in order to have more control over your code. Spoken like someone who spends 28% of his week working in his code base by hand! As always, thanks to our Founding Sponsor, Navalia! The “long working hours” part of this story definitely deserves a “don’t try this at home” warning - it won’t work for everyone. I do think it works for Aravindh, though.
