Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 531: Shallow feedback and my coworker is a huge sloperator

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Listener Jame ain’t no dance asks,! Hey Space Therapists, I am a consultant that helps big companies to fix all kind of stuff. It’s ridiculous how many different hats I wear. One day I’m the interim PM, the other day I am telling SAP devs how to use a coding agent, next day I gather stakeholder requirements for a customer self service portal. I do all of these tasks on a fairly shallow level and all of that work is happening without much coordination from my company. I think I do a good, but it’s hard gathering feedback on my work, since no colleagues are involved and I can’t simply ask the customer without revealing insecurity. Send sophisticated tips and don’t make me quit. Cheers! Can I tell a coworker to stop using Claude? I work on a small team at a midsized company, and a coworker keeps dropping overly verbose pull requests that are full of AI jargon. These are increasingly hard to understand, and then when I ask for design intent clarification I often get sent a long document that is even harder to understand! And the code sucks! misleading docstrings, overly complicated functions, and weird places where the AI has convinced them that something needs to be backwards. And often times I end up having to fix failing tests (that my coworker probably didn’t run), or report back later that their changes have degraded something in prod or is causing a lot of logging noise. I worry that I’m doing the same thing and just not noticing. Code is starting to pile up in review and I don’t want to be rude and comment “ai slop” on 50% of the code! What can i do?

It takes more than becoming a subversion version control hipster to be a great software engineer. This is episode 531 of the Soft Skills Engineering podcast where I'm your host, James and Dance. I'm your host, Dave Smith. Soft Skills Engineering is a weekly advice show about all of the non-technical things that go into the technical field of software development, like going back to the old ways, to the tools that really lasted, you know, like subversion. What was before subversion? Was that like CVS. Yeah, CVS. I never used that one.

I just heard about how much better subversion was than it. Yeah, and CVS was built on RCS, and of course Microsoft had their own thing called Visual Source Save that was parallel to both of them, and it was horrible. Huh. Well, just imagine how much better your life would be if all your problems caused by Git weren't there, and you had a whole separate set of problems. Yeah, totally different, all shiny and stuff for a while.

Yeah. Dave, that's not what our show's about. It's about the magic of other stuff, like thanking our patrons. Do you want to do that? Yeah, a big shout-out to those that are supporting us at a level where they get a weekly shout-out and the very first name I don't know how to pronounce. Oh, yeah, I had to fumble through this live last time.

They are Yuretukalev. Plan your next trip with www. www.weila.com. Actually, I joined to fund Jamison's yacht. Oh, Bucharest Tuscarawas, Pataskala, Kinnik, Kinnik. Oh, boy. Hi. Pika. Gananen-Hooten,

Skioto, Gaiuga, O. All right. Will Wood, what? Lattice Washerum. Seth. Jenny Kim, this took as a parrot, Ivor Chan. Jonathan King, all one word.

To show you love AI, put an upside-down pineapple on your cubicle or office door. Who even knows what their actual names are? My actual name on LinkedIn is Yami debugging in that our candy, token limit reached. Jacob channeling,

Will, Angel of Death. How do you write a joke? I'm kidding. How do you write a joke in 50 characters by? That was funny. Will Corner, Angel? No. Javier Gonzalez, space, chewy, open print, salted fry, semicolon, last episode 100.

JNCC, oh, there's an emoji with a flag, has the most soft skills listeners per capita. Quick, what country is that? Iceland. All right. JNCC Iceland flag, nice. We have next up, Won't Angel

Dan from Joan Deploy Never is not just a creator on Marslemingo emoji I like chicken I like liver Mi'amix please deliver I can see Dodds

Kyle Boss You are doing much better than you think Kent see Dodds and we've got an awesome set of emojis here that spell out

soft skills emogeneering Does that start It starts with the Surprise that made it through Patreon Yeah it did really good It started out

with a A skillet the skillet emoji, which is the international symbol for fans of the podcast, the soft skillet emoji. Oh, I didn't even notice that. Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of hidden. It's glazed over it. Yeah, you must be in dark mode too. I am, yes. Yeah, this is very well done. I just see it everywhere, too, with all the fans we have. Right, just, just unending skillets. Just blends in. Yeah. Soft skills, emojis nearing. Nicely done. Very nice. That is just art.

Okay, Jenny Kim, these toocastic parrot, Ira Chan, Jonathan King, Zainai, beautiful functional user documentation Adrian at kappa. a.I open for an empty name to protest the new name

link limit Will Angel will angel has relapse and is playing factorial the letter R oh no

are we losing this patron we're about to lose Ragnar Ragnar's going away one letter at a time oh man

Brayden Cain's John Grant Brittany Elic closed parentheses followed by literal close parentheses closed parenthesis

followed by a literal close parenthesis oh my gosh that one kills me. Man, I hope we don't lose Ragnar. That would be really sad. I've also noticed that Will Angel has not updated their Patreon name in a while, and I feel like that means the Factorio relapse could be pretty bad.

Yeah, this is bad. It was not bad enough to say that he had relapsed, but it is so bad that he hasn't updated his patron. We better do a wellness check. Dave, should I read our first question? Let's do it. Okay, this is from a listener who claims their name is Jamie ain't no dance

Jamie ain't no dance Instead of Jane is Yep Nice I think so Yep Hey space therapists Yep that is one of our

titles One of our credentials I'm a consultant That helps big companies To fix all kinds of stuff It's ridiculous how many different hats I wear One day I'm the interim PM The other day I am telling

SAP devs how to use a coding agent Next day I gather stakeholder requirements for a customer self-service portal. I do all these tasks on a fairly shallow level, and all of that work is happening without much coordination from my company. I think I do good work, but it's hard gathering feedback on my work since no colleagues are involved, and I can't simply ask the customer without revealing insecurity. Send sophisticated tips and don't make me quit. Cheers. We've been undermined so many times by listeners who know the stick. Well, 531 episodes. Time to get a new one. Yeah. Keep your job. Quit your stick and get a new one.

There you go. That's our mission. Quit your stick. So my interpretation is this is their colleagues they're talking about are like the consulting company. But they're kind of solo from their company at this other at these other clients. Right. That's what I got to. Hard-guarthing feedback on my work. I don't know. Maybe this is a cultural thing. but I feel like if I paid some consultant, especially if they were kind of this jack of all trades, many hat wearing, if they're just kind of doing a fixed job, but as a consultant instead of a full-time person, that feels a little bit different.

But if they're more vaguely focused on, help me solve problems really well, I think it would make me feel good if they said, I really want to do a good job, and I want to know how you think I'm doing, because I would like to wow you. Yeah, with how awesome it's going. Tell me what you think is going well.

Tell me what you think is going well. think you'd like to be different. Well, you've probably seen Jameson those bumper stickers that go on fleet vehicles that say like, How's My Driving, call this number. Oh, yeah. Yeah, maybe just put one of those on your laptop. Yeah. I saw another bumper sticker that said, I have to poop. That's why I'm driving so fast. And my kids like that one a lot. Oh, I bet they loved it. Your kids and me. Yes. So put that one also on your laptop. I have to poop. Next to it. That's why I'm typing so fast. Yeah. that's why I want to end this meeting early. Yes.

Yeah, I don't know. I can't simply ask the customer without revealing insecurity. No. Yeah, that's false. I think this person feels insecure and then projects that. Okay, space, sorry, space therapist, right? I mean, this is, this is like we are credentialed to do this, so you have to take this advice. Yeah, you brought it up.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's like breaking hearts and hearts where, okay, you said it. So now we need to do space therapy. That's right. So here's my space therapy. You are, you feel insecure. And so you then ascribe this, this response onto people that they're just not going to have when you ask them for feedback. Now, I mean, it's one thing to be like, um, am I doing a good job? Please tell me. You know, it's, it's kind of like very different. But if it's another thing just to say, hey, you know, as part of client engagement, when I finish an engagement, I like to gather feedback so we can make sure we're delivering the best possible service for you. Yeah. And here's a like a three question survey and two of them are just, you know, click on the number of stars, you know, and then it's like the third one is just write a sentence or two about how you felt about the service you received. Yeah. Yeah, we work with some consultants for specialized things, not kind of general problem fixers, but they send that stuff out to us too.

Yeah, probably. And sometimes we ignore it and sometimes we actually do fill it out. Yeah, exactly. And that's the other thing is if someone doesn't give you the response, don't assume that it's bad. Also, like every time you get service from some kind of IT help, you know, you're going to get one of these things anyway, right? Like, are those people insecure? I would be. That job would make me insane. I would crumble. That's like, did you turn it off and back on again? Please leave me a five-star review. Yeah. And then they're going to leave you a one-star review because the internet was down. Right. There was nothing you could do. My cellular data connection could only send one-star. Maybe there could be some sensitivity around this if you are working with people.

that you feel like aren't pumped, you're there. Yeah. Maybe someone's brought you in, but the actual people you work directly with are a little grumpy. Maybe, yeah. Feels like, well, our boss doesn't think we can do our jobs, so they brought this outsider in or something. Yeah, to tell us how to use a coding agent. Yeah, but surely someone there is decided to bring you in and is paying you. You should be able to ask them.

Yeah, their opinion probably matters the most. Yeah, like there's some executive who said, well, this team needs to level up their PM and coding agent use and stakeholder requirements gathering. And so I know they're not up to it. That's why we brought you in. And yeah, they hopefully have the good sense to know that the people are grumpy is not feedback necessarily. Although they might not have good sense. And so that's true. Well, no, they brought you in. Oh, well. They do have good sense. Ah, yes. You do run a risk, you know, that you're going to get some negative feedback. and I don't know, I guess you might be inclined to hide that from your own boss or something. I don't know. I'm not saying you should, but I'm saying that that might be something you worry about.

But, you know, I was thinking there might be an opportunity to do something bigger here. If you're a consultant that helps big companies, I wonder if your company already has some kind of mechanism in place for this that you don't even know about. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was actually just thinking that. Yeah, can you see any of that? Do they send it out to their clients? Exactly. And if they, if they, don't, I'd be frankly, kind of surprised. Yeah. It's always a little fraught because are you doing a good job often gets reduced down to does whoever gave the feedback really like you or not? And those are sometimes the same thing, but not always. Yeah. But yeah, I would be surprised if the company was just sending you

out, they're billing you at some rate. And they have no idea. It just has no idea. Yeah. They just find out when the checks stop coming. Like, oh, I guess. Oh, crap. I guess they were in happy, huh? Yeah. Shoot. What can you do? Well, I guess we just don't get the money. Yep. That's not usually how businesses operate. So yeah, I mean, I'd say tap into that. And don't be afraid to ask for feedback. And if you formalize it and just make it seem like it's part of your standard operating procedure, it won't come across as insecure. I would really hate to work somewhere where me asking questions and exploring things and saying, well, how do you think I did on this would make me seem insecure because or cause me to

lose face or I don't know, I would hate that to be so on my guard that I can't reveal any hint of doubt or weighing things or questioning or wanting to get better. Like that would. How could I possibly ask for feedback when I'm already definitely perfect? Yeah. Yeah. Feedback implies I'm not already doing the best possible job. Right. Can't allow that. Which is impossible for me to even consider. Yeah. I think they would appreciate it. Now, not if you do it every day or every week.

week, but maybe at the middle and end of each engagement, I'm assuming these engagements last like a few weeks or a month. Although this person did say one day I'm a PM, the next day I'm SAP devs. If you're literally only spending one day with people, I don't know, how much feedback can you really get? How much legitimate understanding does your client even have? What you're hoping for is to tap into the folklore that is now spreading about you across this company of like a rare sighting of the Sasquatch, you know? Like, oh, I saw that consultant. Yeah, they just appeared out of nowhere and told us about Claude Cod Code and disappeared into the mist.

And we still think about them that to this day. And then you kind of scoop those up together into a new folklore. And then that's your feedback. What kind of legends do they tell about you? Exactly. And how long do those legends persist? Yes. That's the true feedback.

Yeah, although they probably remember longer if you're just outrageously rude and scream at them a lot. I don't know, they were just nice and pleasant and understood a problem, said, oh, here's what you do, and then bailed. That won't stick in their mind as much. So you have to adopt some personas and some eccentric habits. Oh, yeah, totally. Do something truly surprising. Smoke two cigarettes at the same time. Oh, outrageous. Outrageous. That'll help. Have we answered the question? I think so. I'm looking forward to the legends of the SAB consultant who smokes two cigarettes simultaneously.

Yes. Yeah. What a story they'll tell. Yes. I think they just told it. They smoked two cigarettes at the same time. It's kind of a short story. Yeah. All right.

Dave, do you want to read our next question. Let's do it. This comes from Tired of Loadbearing vocabulary. If any of you use AI regularly, you already know what this question is going to be about. All right. The question asker says, can I tell a coworker to stop using Claude? I work on a small team at a mid-sized company and a coworker keeps dropping over verbose pull requests that are all full of AI jargon.

These are increasingly hard to understand. And then when I ask for design intent clarification, I often get sent a long document that is even harder to understand. Oh, man. I hate this so much already. We haven't even gotten to the punchline. Okay, continuing. And the code sucks misleading dock strings,

overly complicated functions, and weird places where the AI has convinced them that something needs to be backwards. and oftentimes I end up having to fix failing tests that my co-work probably didn't run, my coworker probably didn't run, or report back later that their changes have degraded something in prod or is causing a lot of logging noise. I worry that I'm doing the same thing and just not noticing. Code is starting to pile up in review and I don't want to be rude and comment AI slop on 50% of the code.

What can I do? Yeah, the world is changing. This is a problem that could not exist at this same scale even a couple years ago. Yeah. Only very few developers could produce the volume of code that now every developer can produce. And they had to at least kind of understand it to do that. Yeah. There's a couple things going on here. One of them is maybe this gets better as models or harnesses get better, but it does sound like understeered AI. If you just tell it, sure, man, keep going for long enough without giving it feedback or direction.

It does kind of go off the rails with current tech. So that's, I don't know, operator, skill, laziness, error. Like, they could get better at this bit. The other bit is etiquette or conventions or expectations or culture. And there's a handful of good posts. People have written some things that I decided I agree with after reading their posts about this. One of them is called Don't Be a Meat proxy. Oh, yeah.

And it describes exactly the situation where someone submits some code with AI, you review it, you say, these things need to change. They take your feedback, type it into their agent and say, do this. And then you are operating their AI agent through them as an expensive, fleshy proxy. And so they're not doing anything. Like, you would, it would be faster for you to just talk to the agent in the first place. Yeah. Don't do that.

You're just a very expensive tube. Yes. Yes. a very expensive tube. There's also the part of why this feels so bad is because the reality used to be you couldn't really write something without understanding it. So these artifacts carry this now not true connotation that someone thought about this. Right.

And so you're not the first person to try to uncover some meaning out of it. Someone else did. Maybe it's weird and wrong and bad, but they at least exercise their brain enough. And now that's not true. You are probably the first person who has thought anything about the actual. content of these documents or code changes. And that sucks. It feels so bad. It feels bad, but it does come with one good upside. What's that? Which is that you can, you can critique the heck out of it, and nobody's ego is going to be bruised, because they didn't write it. They didn't think about it.

Yeah. I mean, that is true. It is easier for someone to say this stupid robot did something instead of this stupid person did something. But it doesn't scale very well. Like the meta feedback has to be, you should probably have read this first. Like, don't make me read this and understand it for the first time. Yeah, exactly, because the feedback isn't actually about the code. It is, right? But at a surface level it is, but the deeper feedback is, you sent me crap.

And you didn't even put in the work to review it. And now I'm mad. So now I guess we are back to the ego. I guess we're never going to get away. Yeah, like you just produced a ton of work for me. You, it's, oh, there's some concept here. Is it, there's some like DDoS thing where you send out these little tiny packets and they just expand. Mm-hmm.

What is this thing? I can't remember what it's called. I don't know. It's that thing. The thing I can't remember. Oh, yeah, I know what you're talking about. Just kidding. I actually don't.

You just take this really small input and then it explodes and saturates usage somewhere. Well, one specific example of that is a fork bomb. Sure. Yeah, you could think of it like a fork bomb. Yeah, they forkedombed you. They sent these little snippets of curly braces and then that exploded into the, these tons and tons of changes that you have to review and understand. Right.

And the effort disparity feels really bad. It feels bad to be on the other end of that. Yeah, it really does. And I just don't understand why do people think it's acceptable to send code for review that they themselves just have no idea if it's good or not? I mean, they're literally asking you to do something that they themselves could not be troubled to do. There's people that do this, right? There are, yeah.

I mean, there are places that say we don't review code by hand. anymore. Humans don't review code anymore. Yeah, but that's different. Like, if you as a team agree, we're not reviewing code as a team, fine. But if you haven't made that agreement and you say, we do we do manual code review, what do you think's going to happen when you send your code over that you haven't even read over to a reviewer? Like, by definition, you're creating 10 times more work for them than you exerted to create it. Yeah. So, like, this just doesn't balance out. Like, the scales are all messed up now. I've also created this problem at my own company by getting non-engineers hooked up to coding agents.

And then they just, their job is not to understand code. They're enabled by AI, but they, I don't know, we just don't expect them to be able to read it and understand it. But it is the same instance of this problem. It's just culturally more acceptable because they're not an engineer. So we say, we'll figure it out, but you haven't messed up by not reading it and deeply understanding it because we don't expect you to. It still is a bunch of effort.

Right. But in this case, you agreed to that effort. Yeah. I feel like the social contract that's being broken here is I never agreed to be the, okay, I think I'm starting to finally form a concrete image of why this is so wrong. So let's carve out exceptions for the case that you described, where you gave, you gave permission to non-engineers to produce code that the engineers said, we'll, we'll review this and make sure it's good before going to production.

Okay, great. Fine. Contract in place. Everyone's happy. I mean, you're not happy, happy because your workload just went crazy. But at least you're not, at least your expectations are being met. And then you have, let's also carve out an exception for the teams that have agreed, we're going to not human review any of our code.

We have other means for quality checking the code before it goes to production, but we're not going to just human review. Okay, carve that out as well. Let's focus on this scenario where you say, we are keeping our human review step. But there are team members who, are not even reading the code the first time. So why is this a violation of a social contract and why does it feel so bad to me? I think I finally understand. And that is that as the developer who's sending

the code over for review that they haven't even read, you are outsourcing the pre-review job to me. Review, like let's break the word review down. Re means again and view means to look at. and review by definition is someone has already looked at this and I'm the second pair of eyes that is going to confirm that it's good. I'm confirming someone else's work. But this isn't code review. This is actually code view. It's the first time it's being looked at. It's the very first time it's being looked at by human eyes. And so the name is wrong. The expectations are wrong. And also the reviewer is the wrong person to fix the problems. I mean, think about how much work it is now when you say, look, the first time human contact is ever going to encounter this code is at the

quote, review stage. Now the reviewer has to write all these comments down and where are they going to go? Well, they're going to go straight into the LLM. Well, then darn it, you should have had the engineer do that in the first place because that's a much faster feedback loop. So you're just operating in this totally inefficient way. And the roles, the responsibilities of the two players here, are just completely misallocated. It does make me feel like there's some steering or guy, yeah, you can, there's the cultural solution of saying, hey, you still have to read all of your code before you submit it for review. Even if the AI wrote it, you have to have looked at every single line.

And that's something you could bring up to the team and say, do we want to do this? Yes, yes. Oh, who said that? Weird. Sounds like there's a consensus. There's also some work. you can do to kind of steer the agents and how exactly this works best, changes all the time with new models and harnesses and some combination of linting

and guidance injected of here's how we do stuff. This can help, but there's always things that don't quite fit still. It can reduce the amount of just totally off the rails wildly incorrect things that happen. That's probably not a thing you want to just go off and do by yourself. And the other part that feels bad, this did happen before LMs. I've seen engineers that are sort of like the defenders of quality, right? And they view themselves, maybe correctly, maybe not, as responsible for holding out the barbarian unwashed masses

that just want to ruin their nice code base. Yes. They're going to do it the crappiest, fastest way, and they have to hold the line. Right. And it is different in some ways because of the robots. But that's usually a stressful spot to be in. to feel like I have to like put up barriers or the code will dissolve into into slop.

And the business isn't going to like that because I'm making stuff go slower. And it just feels bad to be the, I don't know, the person that tells people know all the time. But you have the same problem at higher scale. And one of the ways to get rid of that problem is to write stuff down and agree it on it. So to the extent that these are specific things, you can say we don't do it this way. It's worth doing. But also certainly worth doing what you said, Dave, of like the Benno level. You have to have read this first.

If you don't, we'll close the PR. Yes. We'll just say no and close it. Maybe just put one checkbox on your PR template that says, I have read this code. Yeah. And the agent's going to check it. Yeah, I read it. I had to predict all these tokens.

Yeah. Agents like, yep. Maybe we should have two checkbox on every PR. There's a code view checkbox and a code review. checkbox. I think we need three and then it's like the TCP handshake of like synack. Yeah. It's code view, code re and code review.

Yeah. Those are the three-way handshake. Yes. Yep, that's what we need. But the agent did the first handshake or the first step. Yeah, the human just did UDP. He just said, hucking this out there. Good luck everyone else.

Yep, that's right. That's not very polite. Yeah. UDP is not very polite. Well, have we answered it? Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, that's what this comes down to. This is a process problem at the team level that needs to be agreed upon that we are or are not going to do this. And I think successful teams right now are doing a bit of a hybrid where they understand the scope of impact, the blast radius, the importance of different code.

And they know that some code needs human scrutiny twice, you know? and you used to get one by virtue of writing it. Now you get zero automatically. And so two human scrutinies is enough. Now, having said that, you know, maybe we need to rethink this Jameson and say, look, if you do insist on human reviewed code, maybe the developer who prompted the AI to write the code is actually the reviewer. Like, why are we inserting now a third, essentially a third view?

Because the AI wrote it, you know, and there's some amount of correctness to that. and then the human developer reviewed the AI code. Why can't it go to production now? Why does it need another human to look at it? You've already had three agents now at this point. You've got the AI agent, the human agent, and then the human reviewer agent. And I say agent, kind of like in air quotes,

because humans are the original agent. I don't know. Maybe that's what needs to happen here, but nevertheless, teams are figuring this out in real time. And what we've figured out on my team is that some code, yes indeed, does need very careful scrutiny. It needs to be babysat as it goes to production.

There's all kinds of alarms and monitoring you need to make sure it's not going to break something. But some code, it's like, I just don't care that much if it's totally correct. I also don't care if it's totally well architected. And you have to decide which code that is for your team. Yeah. And then you really ought to agree on it.

Because at the end of the day, this conflict is happening because of mismatched expectations on the team and an unclear process that has not been, like, at least in the mind of you, has not been honored. Yeah. Like there is, or maybe a better way to say that as two different team members actually have different ideas of what the process should be. Yeah.

I have seen teams say we focus on reducing risk by prompting in QA that runs automatically, and I don't know, a whole bunch of technical things and making it really fast to fix something if it does break. and then they can, they, they kind of yolo more stuff. Yeah. And then others that still say, no, like this, this requires quality. We can go faster, but we still have to understand what is being shipped. Yeah, there's kind of a spectrum, but I agree that you, you probably need to pick one on your team explicitly instead of have this fuzziness.

Yeah. I think that's right. You're not alone, certainly. I think you and the person you're talking about, there are many instances of all of you. And some other are the same people, actually. I'm probably both these people that work sometimes. At different times, yeah. Yeah, yeah, but it's times they are changing.

Interesting times. I don't think you are. Like, I think you are sensitive to what other people have to do in response to your actions. And I'm a little bit like that, too. In fact, the other night. I did just think about our two last releases. You broke both of them? They may have had a little whoopsie doodle sneak out in each of them.

Well, I mean, I left an agent running over, night on a performance problem. You know, I wanted it to improve some some performance in a part of our application. And it came back. I woke up in the morning and it had made a bunch of changes. And I looked them over and I'm like, I really don't know if these are good. The numbers look good. Sure, man, whatever. But I really would feel bad dumping this in my team's lap. You know, they got a full workload already. Oh, you went the other direction. Yeah. That's funny. No, I, I, I mean, it's a critical part of our system too. So I really want a human to look it over. but I really hate being the boss who's like,

hey everyone, drop what you're doing because I had an idea. Yeah, something crazy. Stand back, everybody. Remember all those priorities? We agonized over and planned the whole quarter to lay out. Well, we're throwing it all at the window because I was in the shower this morning. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if? And now you get to review 2,000 lines of code.

And then you just get to lecture everybody about how important it is to be high agency. You just do stuff. The world belongs to people who do things. That's right. And they're like, okay, I do not review your poll request then. I use my agency to do the other stuff instead. Right. I think a high agency means do whatever Dave's intrusive thoughts say that we should do.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, well. These shower thoughts are, they've never been more powerful. I know. They can get legs a lot fast. It used to be I'd have a shower thought and I'm like, that's going to take me 40 hours. And now I'm like, I'm running to my computer right now and typing that in. Yeah. Yeah. Good luck everybody else. Standing in the ashes of my shower thoughts.

I may have just shipped like 10,000 lines of terraform code last week. Did you really? Some poor person on my team had to kind of sort of review. Oh, had to pretend to review. They're like, wow, that review only took you three minutes. We had a gentleman's agreement where I said, please review this. Wink. And he said, great, I will.

Wink. And then we just didn't talk much after that until the approvals came in. He's like, wouldn't you know it? 10,000 lines of terraform, not a single problem found. Impressive. Yes, yes. You're like, I'm so good. that good.

James isn't so good at Terraform. It's those thousands of hours you've spent agonizing over Terraform files, finally paid off. Yep. Perfect Terraform first try. Well, you said it. We're perfect. The question is answered.

What can people do if they want more of this perfection? Yeah, all you got to do is go leave a review for us, but not just make sure it's a good review because we're very sensitive and insecure. Yes. No, but actually, you know, I haven't checked on our reviews lately. We should go read those and read some of them on the air or something. It might be fun. Maybe people can start changing their Apple podcast names.

Like, people change their Patreon names and we'll read the craziest ones. Oh, man, that would be so funny. Doesn't that have to change your name in like messages? On your bank. Like your Apple Pay, everything. Yeah. I think, I mean, how committed are you? For true believers.

If you're really a soft skillet, you will change. your entire identity as recorded by your local government. Oh, you're saying like your legal name. Yeah, why not? I don't know. It feels like if you're going to go, you ought to go. Yeah, be high agency. Yeah. And do the thing we told you to do. Right. Use Jameson's high agency.

Yeah. Make me high agency by you doing the thing I want you to do. Said every dictator ever. All right. So anyway, if you want to get your own question answer, go to soft skills. Audio and click the Ask a Question button. We have carefully prepared a form for you to fill out. And I've got to say, all the code you see on Soft Skills. Audio is written by Jameson's and My Fingertips.

Oh, actually, we did have a consultant help at one point. But that's pre-AI. It's all artisanal handcrafted. Yeah, this is handcrafted website. It's very beautiful. And you can fill out our form where you can ask our question. Thank you so much that those of you that do that every week. We read all your questions, and we love them.

I wish we could answer all of them in real time, but we will answer them on a delay. Basically, what happens is we fall behind every week a little bit, but we'll make it up in volume through time dilation. Right at the end, yeah. Yeah, right. At the very last moment. Yeah, some kind of multiverse cloning thing will scale up. That's right.

You know, that's seen in, what's the Marvel movie? Infinity War, how Dr. Strange goes and explores like a million possibilities. Oh, yeah. And comes back and he says only one. That's us, but we're going to answer. for all your questions in those multiverses, universes. Yes, I can't wait. All right, thank you for listening.

We'll catch you next week.