Category: systems
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The Mythical Man-Month: chapters 1-6
The first six chapters still matter in the agent-coding era because Brooks was not mainly warning about typing speed. He was warning about coordination, conceptual integrity, integration, and the cost of turning programs into systems.
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The Mythical Man-Month, Chapters 7-12: coordination is the product
TLDR: Chapters 7-12 make one old lesson feel new again: large software fails when coordination, budgets, documents, prototypes, and tools are treated as secondary work. Agent systems inherit the same constraints.
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The End of Software Engineering: code is becoming a runtime artifact
TLDR: The title is deliberately provocative, but the useful claim is narrower: agentic systems move durable value away from static code alone and toward intent, tools, memory, evals, observability, and governance.
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Crafting Interpreters: Chapter 2 - A Map of the Territory
TLDR: This note maps the interpreter pipeline from source text through tokens, parsing, semantic analysis, code generation, and runtime choices.
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Crafting Interpreters: Chapter 3 - The Lox Language
TLDR: Lox is the small language that carries the book: expressive enough for classes, closures, and control flow, but compact enough to implement twice.
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Crafting Interpreters: Chapter 4 - Scanning
Scanning is the first structural boundary in an interpreter: raw characters become tokens, so the parser can work with language units instead of individual bytes.
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CS336: Lecture 3 - LM Architecture and Hyperparameters
TLDR: LM architecture is a stack of trade-offs across normalization, activations, attention, positional encoding, hyperparameters, stability, and inference cost.
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CS336: Lecture 4 - Mixture of Experts
TLDR: MoE scales parameter count through sparse expert routing, but the real work is balancing tokens, capacity, communication cost, and specialization.