I use Claude code. I have access to do full on agentic shit, but mostly all it does is fan out an agent or two to read code and documentation. My process is describe specifically what I want sort of like a story. If it takes more than a paragraph or ten bullets to explain in exact detail, it’s too big. Generate an implementation plan from a template. Look the plan over. Make any changes. It writes the code, then writes the tests, then updates documentation. I review everything at each step.

The implementation plan is critical because you’ll see if it wants to do something like create an enum to hold a single value or refactor the name of a method for no particular reason.

We have extensive documentation of standards and practices, and generally how we structure code. I have templates for things like writing up the implementation plan. Questions that need to be answered. Important context. It has all the information to build it, but you have to double check that it’s from the instructions.

I generally have a “smart” model do the planning and a dumber one do the implementation. I make use of skills. I watch it talk to itself and if I see it going off the rails I interrupt it and correct it.

It’s not the sexy 10x productivity boost people claim when doing prototyping, but it’s clearly faster than doing without. I can get 3 or 4 stories done in an evening after meetings and such. If I have five minutes between meetings I can see what it has done and set it in it’s next step.

Last night I had an instance of Claude collecting information for a production support ticket while I had another one work on a ticket in one app and a third working on another app. Every time one got going I’d go over to another and see what was going on.

I tried to create a set of 11 stories to build an entire feature in one go. It was a mess. Yeah I got 11 stories done in two days, but then code review on one would require changes and rebasing dependent stories. I’ve done more rebasing in the past ten days than the rest of my career. That was a mistake.

My boss is all gung ho about me doing it that way, but I just can’t seem to make it work.

I’m not a big fan of “agentic” coding. Don’t get me wrong, I am trying to create a process by which agentic programming is more reliable, but it’s piling AI artifacts on top of AI artifacts. The error rate compounds and by the time it’s working on the 5th story everything is garbage. You have to review everything at every step to find and fix those errors to keep everything on track.

I have a lot more success giving it one story at a time — each one targeted toward small, incremental steps. It does well. Then clear the context out and start another small story. I don’t trust agentic programming.

I have an AI to help do production support when I’m in meetings or whatever. It comes to the dumbest conclusions about the root cause and the resolution path. But the logs and queries it pulls for me are very helpful. And sometimes it’s analysis holds a bit of useful insight.

That’s because vibe coding isn’t a thing. AI is remarkably good at following instructions and terrible at reading your mind. Give it specific instructions about what needs to be done and how it needs to be done, and it does really well. That doesn’t mean it’s not stupid sometimes, but that’s why you check what it does. My biggest problem was getting it to stop over-designing and implement the smallest necessary change. I had to explain the difference between an implementation task and a refactoring task. That made a huge difference in quality.

Be someone other people like to work with and politics take care of themselves. Do your best to make other peoples’ jobs easier, from the users you are developing for to your leadership and peers to the people who work under your leadership. If things are going sideways, communicate that. At the end of the day, it’s a team effort. One chair leg can’t do anything by itself, but four of them hold up a seat, and the seat can carry a heavy load. That’s my goal.

I know it’s not like that everywhere, and I count myself lucky every day to love my job.

It is frustrating that a person can be as willfully idiotic as they can and if they get taken for fools by the fascists, that the left is right there with a safety net preventing them from finding out after they fucked around. I think at some point you are enabling idiots to go on being idiots without consequences.

Largely I agree, but at some point kindness in the face of hatred becomes its own kind of idiocy. You can’t be allies with someone who is ambivalent or worse about whether you live or die.

If you have the knowledge and understanding to build such a system from the ground up, and you can translate that knowledge into a set of very detailed instructions, you might be successful in this. If you can’t, you will not.

The fact that you couldn’t fix a bug it introduced by just rolling back to an earlier commit and trying something different tells me a lot. You likely don’t have the domain knowledge to build a social media site (no worries, me either). Have you moderated / admined social media before?

What’s your database going to be? What’s the schema? Why? What endpoints will you need? What is the API contract? What is your versioning scheme for your API contract? What admin tools do you intend to create? How are they secured? How do you store passwords? How does a user reset their own password? How do you prevent hacking attempts?& How do you handle media? How do you handle gdpr requests? How will you handle blocking? How will you prevent CSAM? How will you handle DDOS attacks?

If you haven’t thought about every single one of those questions and more, you’re not ready to build this. Good luck, mate.

I deliberately eschew attention. I make my little comments and each one exists on its own. On rare occasions where I develop any kind of meager following, I feel like I’m no longer being me and instead I have to perform me and I hate it.

It’s okay to not want to play the game.

I’m having coffee. Because I’m dragging ass. Because yesterday was my grandson’s first birthday. But that was just the pièce de résistance of a week that saw me working through last weekend and putting in about 100 hours this week because my team was behind in a deliverable and that would hold up multiple other teams, making delivery by end of September impossible.

So I coded and refactored on a project I’ve never touched before because I’m the technical lead, which means I spend all day every day in meetings and unblocking people and planning new projects. All this, only to find out on Friday, with 4 hours of sleep, as I was running back and forth between meetings and helping set up for the party, that some other team didn’t understand the requirements until they tried to implement the design which we provided weeks ago.

They were supposed to build a landing page to call the registration and login API and orchestrate the results. They have done none of it and now want to re-architect the whole back end to give them less work. After I nearly killed myself getting my team’s ducks in a row.

So I’m exhausted I think I’ve slept 10+hours each of the last two nights and the only fuel I have left in my take is rage and venom. And I have to process this all by tomorrow so I can figure out how to calmly and diplomatically explain to this other team that they can eat shit.

Which is where the coffee comes into play. Sorry to interrupt my gripping tale of breakfast fluids with such a lengthy rant about tech. Cheers!

The border between the two areas of greatest concentration looks to be about Toledo… which tracks.

What personal notes? That Sathyaraj has managed to turn about 3 weeks of work into three months? That I have to remember to hound the platform team to review a change request? Or that I requested a production change so I have to remember to go to the approval board today to get it approved?

OpenAI can have all that.

I use sat nav to places I know how to get to all the time because google/apple know what roads are closed or have an accident, and I don’t.

I think point by point directions. Like MapQuest.

I use it to manage my task list. I have Codex hooked up to Obsidian and it manages the tedious stuff that would be onerous to do by hand. Organization is by far my greatest weakness. I would be so much worse at my job if I had to spend my mental energy doing menial shit.

The smaller and more procedural the task, the better AI is at it.

I donate to my lemmy server BECAUSE it is free. If it cost money to be here, I wouldn’t be.

One key piece of getting good results from LLMs is not to have them do anything you can’t do yourself. I catch AI doing weird things all the time and just fix it or have AI fix it accordingly.

Left to its own devices, AI will generally produce bad output over a large enough size. This is why I argue AI will ultimately not replace developers. Even the best models I’ve seen just make more sophisticated errors. The product must be reviewed and fixed by someone who actually understands how to write it.

The question is more the threshold at which AI costs more than is gained in efficiency. As we’ve seen a lot of folks don’t gain efficiency, that’s obvious in some cases. Yet, other folks do see gains and the question is whether this is a domain issue or a technique issue.

At last! A potential use for hydrochoriquin? The stopped clock might’ve been right for once?

Oh, that’s right. They aren’t horses.

No! Keep going until we return to the sacred timeline!

God damn, people can’t resist fucking things up. If your purpose for putting something on the internet isn’t to share knowledge, then fuck your thing, and fuck you.

I’m going to guess your business isn’t the sale of propane and propane accessories.

The President is the Commander in Chief of the United States military. His toady is the Sectary of Defense. And generals are being put into positions where they must violate their oaths or resign. (Presumably. We’ve had several prominent resignations — often just before apparently illegal military operations that would’ve been under their control.) SecDef refuses to promote females and people of color into high ranks. It’s a long process because the system is designed to make this difficult, so the job isn’t complete, but he had made significant progress.

To be fair, there are things he doesn’t have direct control over, but those things are largely under the control of his lackeys because trump nominates them and they serve temporarily until the Senate confirms them. But Republicans control the Senate and only the absolute worst people or those with some sense of shame aren’t confirmed.

Trump is the chief executive, so any government function that isn’t directed by the judiciary or Congress is under his leadership. Every federal enforcement branch: armed forces, fbi, CIA, regulatory bodies, education, environment, is all under his control directly or indirectly.