Austin Z. Henley

Associate Teaching Professor
Software and Societal Systems Department
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University

azhenley@cmu.edu
@austinzhenley
github/AZHenley

Blog Articles

I write about software engineering, academia, AI, product design, and usability. (RSS feed)

• Where are the proactive AI coding tools? (5/4/2025)
• The design of software engineering course projects (4/28/2025)
• My 25-year adventure in AI and ML (12/31/2024)
• Mirror: An LLM-powered programming-by-example programming language (11/17/2024)
• Ad hoc tools for gathering prompt context (9/30/2024)
• Evaluating your AI models in the wild (8/24/2024)
• The blog posts I haven't written (yet) (7/21/2024)
• Can ChatGPT do data science? (7/14/2024)
• Rejoining academia (7/10/2024)
• Optimizing a bignum library for fun (7/9/2024)
• Making a bignum library for fun (6/13/2024)
• CodeAid: A classroom deployment of an LLM-based programming assistant (5/19/2024)
• Exploring 50 user interfaces for AI code suggestions (5/7/2024)
• How I would redesign Copilot Workspace (4/29/2024)
• Mistakes that data science students make (4/28/2024)
• Learning to code with and without AI (3/31/2024)
• Acquired in 99 days (3/7/2024)
• Satirical ways to measure academics (2/19/2024)
• The pain points of building a copilot (2/4/2024)
• Leaving Microsoft (12/16/2023)
• Machine learning of GUIs at scale (10/31/2023)
• A raycasting engine in 7 easy steps (9/30/2023)
• Particle playground (8/6/2023)
• Stopping at 90% (7/31/2023)
• Bespoke GUIs on the fly (7/26/2023)
• PM is the choose-your-own-adventure role (6/30/2023)
• Why I started (and stopped) making games (6/19/2023)
• My first superoptimizer (5/29/2023)
• Data wrangling with Data Wrangler (5/20/2023)
• The future of programming: Research at CHI 2023 (4/27/2023)
• What does a research grant pay for? (4/9/2023)
• Don't trap me in a chat window (3/16/2023)
• Hofstadter: An esoteric programming language with concurrency, regex, and web requests (3/13/2023)
• AI-generated code needs permission labels (2/28/2023)
• Papers on the UX of AI programming assistants (2/20/2023)
• Natural language is the lazy user interface (1/27/2023)
• The pain points of teaching computer science (1/16/2023)
• My first experience using Swift, SwiftUI, and XCode (1/2/2023)
• Challenging algorithms and data structures every programmer should try (12/21/2022)
• My future teaching statement (11/22/2022)
• Does experience make you a better programmer? (10/30/2022)
• Programming as play (10/19/2022)
• Coding with Copilot for acceleration and exploration (10/10/2022)
• Why is it hard to learn another programming language? (10/8/2022)
• Monthly obsessions (10/4/2022)
• An AI assistant for command line errors (9/24/2022)
• Measuring demand for a feature: An economics approach (8/29/2022)
• My HCI toolbox: Methods for designing and evaluating UIs (7/31/2022)
• Learning HTML was too hard so I made a compiler instead (6/29/2022)
• Computational notebooks research at CHI 2022 (5/13/2022)
• Take my app ideas (4/19/2022)
• The project with a single 11,000-line code file (4/3/2022)
• Amplifying others (3/27/2022)
• A study guide for software engineering students (3/14/2022)
• What a $500,000 grant proposal looks like (2/21/2022)
• Leaving academia (1/6/2022)
• Lessons from my PhD (12/27/2021)
• "This project will only take 2 hours" (11/8/2021)
• Paradox of the perfect code editor (10/15/2021)
• When users never use the features they asked for (9/29/2021)
• Building solutions to problems that no one knows exist yet (8/28/2021)
• Technical blogs worth reading (7/29/2021)
• Gamification, life, and the pursuit of a gold badge (6/24/2021)
• Stack Overflow knows your future problem (6/17/2021)
• Why I prefer making useless stuff (5/22/2021)
• An inquisitive code editor: Overcome bugs before you know you have them (5/11/2021)
• A theory of how developers seek information (4/24/2021)
• All my career rejections (3/21/2021)
• Navigate your code like it's 2021 (3/3/2021)
• Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago? (2/18/2021)
• Python strings are immutable, but only sometimes (2/15/2021)
• Can you make a basic web app without googling? I can't (1/29/2021)
• More challenging projects every programmer should try (12/20/2020)
• Progress bars still lie: Please fix them (11/23/2020)
• List of human-centered software engineering dissertations (11/22/2020)
• Parsing RISC-V assembly (10/26/2020)
• Useful functions for game development (9/21/2020)
• Implementing cosine in C from scratch (7/19/2020)
• Let's make a Teeny Tiny compiler, part 3 (7/5/2020)
• Let's make a Teeny Tiny compiler, part 2 (6/5/2020)
• Let's make a Teeny Tiny compiler, part 1 (5/5/2020)
• Books I recommend to my software engineering students (2/29/2020)
• Hey Dropbox, why can't I compare file versions like this? (1/27/2020)
• What's wrong with computational notebooks? (1/19/2020)
• Going viral on Reddit and Hacker News (12/28/2019)
• Challenging projects every programmer should try (12/11/2019)
• Design patterns for hacking together prototypes: Facilitator (10/27/2019)
• Design patterns for hacking together prototypes: Catch All (10/7/2019)
• Design patterns for hacking together prototypes: Object Dictionaries (9/30/2019)
• Is optional null better? (9/4/2019)
• The 8 lessons I learned from releasing 8 video games (7/17/2019)
• Quick start guide to research on human factors of software engineering (7/7/2019)
• Type inference has usability problems (6/27/2019)
• What I got from 5 internships during grad school (9/9/2018)
• Faculty interview questions I asked and got asked (5/14/2018)
• My favorite Wikipedia articles about science (11/11/2016)