REPLs All The Way Up: A Rubric For Better Feedback Loops
summary
Argues that the Read-Eval-Print-Loop is the gold standard for exploratory feedback and gives a concrete rubric: read-eval-print-loop properties (incremental, private, multi-channel, stateful, scrollback, rich errors). Recommends tools and practices that reproduce that feel at larger scopes: REPLs and TDD for code, using Faker to iterate database seeds, strace and BPF Trace for tracing, SQL for data exploration, debuggers/hot reload, continuous deployment with feature flags, observability and distributed tracing to keep experiments fast and surprising.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:37Feedback loops
- 4:21Agenda
- 4:48History of exploratory feedback loops
- 17:38What properties make REPLs feel so good?
- 26:43REPLs are exploramental
- 28:05REPLs are fast
- 31:47Examples, from small to large
- 48:36Seek exploratory feedback
- 49:20Outro
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