Ben McCormick

👋 Hi! I'm Ben.

I make software in Pittsburgh, PA. This is my site where I write about work and life. Work content focuses on engineering leadership and productive product teams, life is a mix of fitness, sports and faith. If you're interested seeing more, feel free to subscribe. First time on the site? Start here.


Work

Coding is deciding 2025-08-22

Retraining our Brains To Review LLM-augmented work 2025-07-22

A Simple Path To Building Trust 2024-06-25

Setting Expectations: 4 key areas for performance management 2023-02-12

3 Pillars For Effective Work 2023-01-13

2022 Books 2023-01-03

7 Months of Lifting At Home 2022-12-28

Mental Models For Managing Change 2022-01-24

More Thoughts On Time 2022-01-10

How I Think About Time 2021-12-13

Life

2024 Lifting Recap - A better year 2025-02-09

Lifting Program Review: Easy Strength 2024-08-25

Lifting in the first half of 2024 2024-07-10

2023 Lifting Recap: Frustration & Learning 2024-01-27

Books Read in 2022 2023-01-02

Blog Updates: New name, new platform 2022-12-17


Microblog

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Happy New Year to all

This is a good summary of the state of AI takes right now I think

No one knows anything about AI

AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why.

AI currently has all the “noise” and incentives to hype that crypto had a few years ago, but underneath that is clearly much more “real”. It makes things hard to evaluate for now.

The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”; we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere.

Jacque Sellul

This quote has been haunting me all weekend. It describes and explains so much of the tension in modern life.

The intended takeaway from all this is exactly where we started in the introduction: creating quality is context specific. Be wary of following the playbook you’ve seen before, even if those playbook were tremendously successful. They might work extremely well, but they often don’t unless you have a useful model for reasoning about why they worked in the former environment.

Loved the thoughts on quality here from Will Larson: lethain.com/quality/

Over a year old, but new to me – I thought this series of posts was a great roundup of some of the issues that make tech a less happy place to work than in the previous decade: Software and its Discontents

Very helpful writeup on LLMs in production: What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs

Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail

This is an old piece, but new to me. What a great turn of phrase, and accurate insight about doing hard things.

Last year when I started powerlifting as my main form of exercise I set goals of being able to do

5x325 High bar squat 5x400 Deadlift 5x150 Overhead Press 5x250 Bench Press 10x body weight pull-ups (I’d never been able to do more than 2)

BP and Pull-ups are still struggling, but I’ve now managed 3/5

Diving back into (Neo)Vim this week for the first time in a few years (have done my core work with VS Code for a while).

Telescope Plugin + Language Server Providers are nice additions to the landscape, and it all feels so powerful, but everything is still so fiddly to setup :/

Really enjoyed these reflections on LLMs: medium.learningbyshipping.com

AI, ChatGPT, and Bing…Oh My