Austin Z. Henley

Principal Applied Scientist
Excel Agent Science Team
Microsoft

austin.henley@microsoft.com
@austinzhenley
github/AZHenley

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Blog Articles

I write about software engineering, academia, startups, AI, product design, and usability.
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Automating my job away (6/7/2026)
Academia, startups, big tech, and back again (5/17/2026)
Dear researchers: Is AI all you've got? (2/22/2026)
Simulating the ladybug clock puzzle (1/17/2026)
I canceled my book deal (12/31/2025)
Langjam Gamejam: Build a programming language and then use it to make a game in 7 days (11/28/2025)
The design space of AI coding tools (10/18/2025)
My startup diary: Techstars (10/12/2025)
We are starting a company to rethink email (9/15/2025)
Baby's first type checker (8/31/2025)
Assessing students in the era of AI (8/10/2025)
100 blog posts, 6 years, 5 million views (6/19/2025)
What makes a good side project? (6/16/2025)
The fastest way to detect a vowel in a string (6/13/2025)
Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city (6/3/2025)
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)