He puts words around what I've been feeling for the past 6 months or more:

> Ousterhout introduces the term “tactical tornado” for a programmer who churns out tons of working but overly complex code that doesn’t fit well into the existing system. Worse, a bad manager often sees a tactical tornado as the most productive programmer on a team, failing to recognize the complexity and code debt left behind for the rest of the team to clean up. If we aren’t careful managers, AI agents can easily become the ultimate tactical tornadoes.

Russ also has a great blog, with the most recent entry on fast floating-point printing and parsing. I believe these performance improvements have landed in the latest version of Go. https://research.swtch.com/fp

I recently learned that Russ also wrote software for The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (https://oeis.org) and is the president of the OEIS Foundation.

> Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other people.

I love the "Tornado" term and "software debt"... worked with a few over the years, fixed the bug but broke the paradigm. Well articulated wisdom.

Cloudflare says I'm not allowed to view the page. At least they are protected from "attacks."

Solid interview but honestly a bit boilerplate in parts. The bit about "program death" and Naur's theory is gold though, even worth re-reading every few years. His take on AI feels a bit cautious though. I think he's underestimating how fast tactical tornadoes are gonna become the default just because managers love seeing shit get done fast, even if it's messy...

Yet he is actively making the world worse at Google. Go (lol) figure!