@yegor256 news

If you love Claude Code as much as I do, you may find this new blog post interesting: Help the Agent to Feel. In the article, I argue that without our help a coding agent can't feel the aesthetics of the source code and the elegance of software design. The agent can write correct code better than us, but it can't write it as pretty as we expect. We can and must help him.

What do you think about the indentation in this small Java snippet? If it looks ugly to you—as it does to me—you may appreciate a formatting principle I suggest for any programming language: Monotonic Indentation (unless I reinvented the wheel). The idea is simple: between any two adjacent lines, indentation may increase by exactly one unit. The blog post explains the principle in detail.

One week left until we close submissions for the 9th KaiCode festival of open source projects. You can still submit your baby and get honest feedback from our jury. We don’t care about your product’s popularity — we only pay attention to quality. Winners may receive up to $4,096. So far, we’ve received 103 153 repositories, and more keep arriving.

UPD: The submission is closed. But you can submit to next year competition, here.

It took six months to write the second volume of the Angry Tests book, and today it’s finally published on Amazon. The book goes deeper into building stronger tests, explores many exotic testing techniques, and introduces the concept of Headless Development. If you buy it on Amazon and leave an honest review, I’ll refund 50% of your purchase.

Many thanks to all reviewers, who helped me make it better: Alexey Fedotov, Alexey Sedoykin, Anton Belyaev, Artem Yegorov, Edouard Mangel, Emanuel Trandafir, Gennadii Chursov, Igor Zarvanskyi, Mathieu Ghennassia, Maxim Ivanov, Nikita Vasilyev, Robert Vitonsky, Ruslan Dibirov, and Sergey Karmanovich.

В середине июня несколько экземпляров будет в Москве, заказать можно здесь. Первый том можно заказать здесь.

I've published my Claude Code skills, which make my daily coding routine more comfortable. Feel free to use and improve.

One of my recent tweets has got a lot of reaction recently, both positive and negative. What do you think about this idea?

Посмотрел я наконец-то Обитель (2020) от Александра Велединского по роману Захара Прилепина. Шедевр! Злой и тяжелый. Хочу посмотреть второй раз, что бывает редко, особенно с сериалами. Шесть лет назад я его пропустил, из-за Безрукова на обложке. Зря! Не так уж его и много, и совсем он почти не приторный. Будете смотреть, не пропустите главный конфликт — между романтиком чекистом, разочарованным в революции, и студентом нигилистом, разочарованным в Христе. А между ними, разумеется, женщина, разочарованная в мужчинах. #movie #кино

Thanks to Claude Code (who else, right?), we finally have the ability to write elegant Ruby code. A few weeks ago I released rubocop-elegant, an extension for RuboCop, the static analyzer for Ruby. It enables most cops and adds a few important ones that make code truly elegant. Give it a try — and a star.

Our research paper was accepted at the SOAP workshop of the PLDI conference. The study presents an optimizer of Java stream pipelines. It can take this code, already compiled into bytecode, as an input:

IntStream.of(NN)
  .map(x -> x + 1)
  .map(x -> x + 2);

And turn it into this one, also in bytecode:

IntStream.of(NN).mapMulti(
  (x, c) -> c.accept(x + 1 + 2)
);

The second snippet works faster than the first one. The novelty of our stream fusion instrument is the usage of 𝜑-calculus as an intermediate representation of bytecode. Also, it outperforms the baseline on two benchmarks out of nine.

You can try our optimizer in your own Java project—just add hone-maven-plugin to the POM of your Maven build and see how Stream pipelines start working faster. Also, read the pre-print of the paper and its sources. If you want to join our research team, text me.

If your research focuses on source code generation, analysis, or optimization, consider ICCQ’26 as a publication venue. This will be the sixth consecutive edition of the conference, and, as in previous years, we expect support from the IEEE Computer Society, with all accepted papers indexed in Scopus. This year, the Program Committee already includes two ACM Fellows: Benjamin C. Pierce, Philip Wadler, and Doug Lea. The conference will be held remotely, so no travel is required to present and publish your work. The call for papers closes on August 1, and there is still time to submit.

Coding is cheap. We don’t need coders anymore. We have Claude Code. You still want to make money as a programmer? Become a courier. Your job is delivering code to the repository, not writing it. Learn how to be a courier if you still want to make money. Just published a new blog post about it: Couriers, Not Coders.

21 мая в Москве буду с докладом на Sbergile — есть такая конференция от Сбера. Приходите послушать, но сначала регистрируйтесь. Расскажу о своих прогнозах касаемо роли человека в мире ИИ — и не наоборот.

В конце июня, числа 25-го в четверг, хотим провести встречу с вами, дорогие читатели, и презентовать мою новую книгу — второй том Angry Tests. Посоветуйте место, где встречу провести: уютное кафе/зал/лофт в центре Москвы. Займет все мероприятие около двух часов, вечером после работы. Видео запишем и выложим, но если есть желание посетить, пожалуйста, заполните анкету — всех разместить наверняка не сможем, выберем лучших.

Some may agree with me that software outsourcing almost always follows the same scenario: the budget grows, deadlines shift, and the result disappoints. This is a systemic error that most companies don’t even notice. I gave a talk back in 2017 at the Kyiv Outsourcing Forum explaining why the classical models (Fixed Price and Time & Materials) inherently work against the client, how teams begin to hide the truth, at what point you completely lose control over the product, and most importantly: what to do about it if you don’t want to burn your time and money for nothing. Bringing up old archives that are still relevant today.

Пролетарий, поздравляю тебя с днем труда! Через десять минут начинаем прямой эфир, юбилейный сотый первомайский. Подключайся на YouTube и VK.

F100: Для юбилейного и первомайского выпуска философского-айтишного прямого эфира нужны ваши особенно острые и важные вопросы. Задавайте в ответ на это сообщение. Постараюсь ответить и постараюсь обеспечить трансляцию без перебоев. До встречи завтра.

I have 200+ GitHub repositories, each of which needs regular dependency updates. I configured Renovate to send me pull requests. It does, sometimes 100+ per day. I don't have to manually review and merge them. Three years ago, I created merged, a Ruby tool that regularly observes all my repositories and merges necessary PRs. Yesterday, I realized that Claude Routines is a better design. I created a new routine and cronned it once per day:

1) Use this OAuth GitHub token: ghp_Pwdo...AdQ.
2) Pick any repository from the @yegor256 account.
3) Pick all PRs submitted by @renovate. 
4) Pick only those not yet merged.
5) Merge them all.
6) Go back to step 2 and pick another repository.
7) Keep repeating until you merge 50 PRs.

You know what it did while running this routine (on its own server)? It wrote a Python script for it and then executed it. When finished, it tossed the script. The fast software concept at its best. The programming language of the future is indeed English.

Do you use Qulice in your Java projects? It’s our static code analyzer that integrates Checkstyle, PMD, and Error Prone, and adds 100+ custom rules to make your code more elegant. Qulice was created in 2011, but over time it suffered from a lack of proper support—we didn’t keep up with the growing backlog of feature requests and bug reports. A few days ago, I decided to ask Claude Code for help. It delivered. Together, we fixed more than 300 (!) GitHub issues—some of them were 12+ years old—and released a new version of Qulice: 0.27.5. Then it helped me upgrade Qulice itself, Cactoos and Takes—we fixed a few thousand (!) violations. Without Claude Code, this work would have taken several developers months, at best.

Try Qulice and see how rough your Java code really is. Then ask your favorite AI agent to clean it up—and watch it start to shine.

JetBrains Air is exactly what I need: a fleet of simultaneously running Claude Code agents that only ask for my confirmation from time to time. Unfortunately, Air doesn’t work with Claude Code. Does anyone know of an open-source alternative? Something like a wrapper around Claude Code and iTerm2? (I want to stay in the terminal and I love Claude Code)

Добавляем субтитры к старым видео на YouTube. Первым проходом, с помощью Whisper CLI (красный цвет) превращаем MP4 звук в .SRT текстовый файл. Затем просим Claude Code (зеленый цвет) исправить неточности. Иногда и грустно и смешно.