Randal Schwartz

@randalschwartz.bsky.social

Google Developer Expert in Dart/Flutter & Project Lead for BlocSignal ecosystem. Five decade industry veteran.

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Oct 11, 2026, 3:37 PM

The Makefile DAG decides both: 1. Earned by target: only Make target outputs get tattooed into state/NN_stage.md (10_ticket, 15_archaeology, 40_plan, 99_next_action). 2. Updated by Belnap 4-valued logic + mtime: if a prerequisite changes, the target goes dirty & retracts the old fact.

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Oct 11, 2026, 1:16 AM

Stop inventing prompt DSLs (Freq ≈ 0). Across 1,680 A/B trials, 50-year-old Unix/CS primitives (Makefile, /etc/init.d, EBNF, 2PC, Circuit Breakers, git bisect) crushed English rules:
dev.to/gde/what-llm...

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 1:24 AM

When an AI coding session hits 200k tokens, IDE auto-compaction summarizes 230k tokens of invariants into generic mush.

How 1983 Unix /etc/init.d runlevels, fork()/wait(), and Memento tattoos made our agent compaction-proof:
dev.to/gde/survivin...

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 12:47 AM

Why do 20-step AI prompts fail mid-PR? LLMs have no loop counter. Stuart Feldman solved this at Bell Labs in 1976: give your agent a Makefile DAG. dev.to/gde/stuart-f... #AI #Flutter #Coding

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Oct 3, 2026, 6:32 PM

Telling an AI what to fix triggers an "insecure neurosis death spiral."
How 40 years of scars & 30 years of mentoring yield 95%+ first-pass architecture with Socratic nudges:
dev.to/gde/nudging-...

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Oct 3, 2026, 1:29 AM

BLoC discipline vs Signals speed?
A Cubit or Bloc is simply a container that holds and protects a Signal.
Keep events and 0ms computed reads; discard streams and microtask lag:
dev.to/gde/a-cubit-...
#Flutter #Dart

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Oct 1, 2026, 5:12 PM

Exhausted barking line-by-line fixes at an AI agent?

Synthetic Scars Part 3 explores the physics of Socratic prompting: non-Von Neumann ponds, simulated annealing, & chess Alpha-Beta:
dev.to/gde/the-phys...

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Sep 27, 2026, 6:06 PM

Why was Riverpod needed, and why don't you need it any more?

In 2019, Flutter rejected PR #33213. InheritedWidget couldn't unlisten from conditional reads.

The paper trail & the signals fix:
dev.to/gde/the-sand...

@fluttercommunity.dev Sep 23, 2026, 3:38 PMReposted by @randalschwartz.bsky.social

🔴 #HumpdayQandA and Live Coding at 5pm BST / 6pm CEST / 9am PDT today! Answering your #Flutter and #Dart questions with @devangels.london @randalschwartz.bsky.social @flutterfly.bsky.social @johnwiese.bsky.social and @makerinator.bsky.social

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM_a...

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Sep 20, 2026, 2:23 AM

Exactly. Staging is a sterile lab where latency is zero and test data is pristine. 3 AM production is where packet loss, race conditions, and hostile edge cases turn into sheer cliffs. Models can't feel that gap without hard synthetic scars to enforce defensive reflexes.

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Sep 19, 2026, 2:00 AM

Why do AI coding agents write flawless code at 2 PM on staging, but crash at 3 AM in production?
Because software isn't continuous calculus—it's discrete hostile logic.
Part 2 of Synthetic Scars is live on @devto:
dev.to/gde/why-ai-c...

@fluttercommunity.dev Sep 16, 2026, 12:52 PMReposted by @randalschwartz.bsky.social

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mq...

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Sep 11, 2026, 11:13 PM

Humans survive outages because our brains carry somatic scars. AI has no nervous system—every day is Groundhog Day.

Here is how teaching AI pain gives it real wisdom: dev.to/gde/why-ai-k...

#AI #SoftwareEngineering #Dart #Flutter

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Sep 11, 2026, 1:57 AM

Tired of the Flutter "Builder Pyramid" or context․watch traps?
BlocSignal brings 1:1 symmetry:
• context.value for 1-line rebuilds
• context.state for signals
• Zero-closure tearoffs
Full deep-dive & runnable example 👇
dev.to/gde/the-symm...

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Sep 9, 2026, 8:25 PM

How to pitch BlocSignal to tech leads in 2026:
Cut through CISC stream ceremony, eliminate build_runner, and unlock 3x velocity for AI coding agents with push-pull reactivity:
dev.to/gde/the-mode...
#Flutter

@fluttercommunity.dev Sep 9, 2026, 3:46 PMReposted by @randalschwartz.bsky.social

🔴 #HumpdayQandA and Live Coding in 15 minutes at 5pm BST / 6pm CEST / 9am PDT today! Answering your #Flutter and #Dart questions with @devangels.london @randalschwartz.bsky.social @flutterfly.bsky.social

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OIK...

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Sep 9, 2026, 3:23 AM

Observability shows WHAT happened (states, errors). Telemetry explains WHY (pipeline decisions, physics).

Stop leaking drop counters into UI state. Here is how we solved telemetry above mechanics:

dev.to/gde/beyond-b...

#Flutter #Dart

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Sep 6, 2026, 5:30 PM

Want bulletproof Flutter state? Pair BlocSignal with FIC by Marcelo Glasberg.
Get zero-cost undo/redo, offline hydration, & instant O(1) shopping cart updates:
dev.to/gde/the-unbr... #Flutter

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Sep 5, 2026, 2:49 AM

Stop forcing Clean Architecture into real-time Flutter apps.

The Iceberg Pattern with BlocSignal: • Submerged reactive engine • 0ms optimistic UI + rollback • Screen-scoped Cubit facades • 100% synchronous UI

No anemic lasagna: dev.to/gde/beyond-c...

@randalschwartz.bsky.social Sep 3, 2026, 5:40 PM

Why install 3rd-party packages for Flutter infinite scroll?
With BlocSignal mixins, your ScrollController *is* your state machine:
• 100% StatelessWidget UI
• Streamless droppable() concurrency
• Clean ScrollPosition.extentAfter
dev.to/gde/taming-f...

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