Dr. Leif Singer

News

Just One More Prompt

Starting is free now, so I start everything and finish nothing. On the compulsion loop of agentic coding — and why stopping and resuming are _the_ skills to play with now.

Paper Jams

Upcoming Paper Jam: AI and Our Economic Future

We'll be meeting for Paper Jam #19 on Friday, July 17 at 1pm UTC. We'll be discussing: Charles I. Jones AI and Our Economic Future (2026) [link] This one is a departure proposed by a member of Paper Jams. Our papers so far have come from

Paper Jams

Upcoming Paper Jam: "Maybe We Need Some More Examples"

We'll be meeting for Paper Jam #16 on Friday, April 24. This time we'll discuss the following paper: Courtney Miller, Rudrajit Choudhuri, Mara Ulloa, Sankeerti Haniyur, Robert DeLine, Margaret-Anne Storey, Emerson Murphy-Hill, Christian Bird, Jenna L. Butler "Maybe We Need Some More Examples:

Agentic Coding Compresses Cognitive Effort

Wasn't AI supposed to make software development easier? Yes: with the right guardrails and practices, routine programming tasks can now be handed off to an LLM. And no: something else is happening at the same time. I've heard from a few developers now that the work

Paper Jams

Upcoming Paper Jam: How AI Impacts Skill Formation

We'll be meeting for Paper Jam #15 on Friday, March 27 at 2pm UTC. This month we're looking at the following paper: Judy Hanwen Shen, Alex Tamkin How AI Impacts Skill Formation (2026) [link] This paper reports on a between-subjects randomized experiment that investigates how

Using Psychological Research to Influence the Behavior of LLMs

Do large language models trained on human data respond to the same psychological levers that sway us? Once a month, I meet with subscribers to my site's Paper Jam plan to discuss a paper about The Experience of Making Software. This post reports on Paper Jam #10. Thank

Developer Thriving: Four Sociocognitive Factors That Create Resilient Productivity on Software Teams

What factors make developers working in teams thrive? Context: once a month, I meet with subscribers to the Paper Jam plan of my blog to discuss a paper at the intersection of topics such as computer-supported collaborative work, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and psychology. This post reports on

Social Transparency in Networked Information Exchange

How do identity, content, and interaction transparency affect online interactions and collaboration? Context: once a month, I meet with subscribers to the Paper Jam plan of my blog to discuss a paper at the intersection of topics such as computer-supported collaborative work, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and psychology.

Paper Jams! An Experiment

I love working on meaningful things with others. It's how I feel connected with the rest of humanity. And it's when looking beyond my immediate community or organization that I tend to find the most surprising or interesting connections. When I was still in academia, it

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: A Useful Lens For Looking At Developer Tools

Software developers use computers not only for writing programs — they also use them to communicate and collaborate with one another. Software development is very much a social activity: collaboration and communication activities can have a powerful impact on the success of software projects. Computer-support for these activities is not

Self-determination Theory: Understanding Human Motivation for Fun and Profit

When you build software, sooner or later you will want to think about human behavior — most notably about what motivates humans. I don’t mean Skinner boxes, points and ladders, variable reward schedules and the like as you might find them in “free to play but we have an in-

On the Diffusion of Innovations: How New Ideas Spread

If you build software products, chances are that you’ve worried about adoption before. Will anyone use what I’ve built? How can I get more people to use it? And why do people leave after a few days? Many people have written about this problem, and there are indeed