chickensong

Shout out to Title TK by the Breeders.

I think you can use whatever you want. The point is just to drop a quick marker that you can find later, and not interrupt your flow.

If squirrels drank coffee and could read, I imagine they'd read like the author. It sounds horrible to me, but everyone is different I guess.

The article is conflating LLM usage with bad habits.

When you start a project not everything is DRY, and you don't start pulling out shared helpers until they're called for. If you're a slacker and expect the agent to magically fix everything with one-off prompting and only moving forward, it's not going to work. Agents prefer to carry existing patterns forward, just like many humans.

The shared helper example from the article requires intent to refactor. If you ask the agent look for smells and refactor, it will happily assist you with that. If you ask it to add a feature, which happens to add duplication, you get a feature with duplication because you didn't specify anything else.

Better yet, add tooling like static code analyzers (shout out to Credo) to your development pipeline and catch stuff like this regardless of LLM. Verify against a mechanical baseline, with LLM judgement layered on top as-needed.

"The most frustrating part: I thought I was outsourcing maintenance to the LLM, but the slippery slope I found myself on was actually training it to have ever-worsening habits."

That's on you. The LLM is a tool and you're not using it well. Build a good foundation for the agents to anchor on, and you'll get good results moving forward.

Use hooks.

> They simply dont have the culture to evolve. The devotion to next quarters numbers and share holder value play a massive part in this.

I think this sums up the problems pointed out by the article, as well as most organizational problems in general.

When I was younger, I thought management was basically useless, do-nothing mucky mucks, who did more harm than good. This can still be true, but I've changed my opinion. Hiring and firing is hard. Creating a strong and healthy culture is hard. Defining success, and steering the ship to it is hard.

I think as long as money is the measurement of success, particularly from a short-term viewpoint, nothing can change. Public companies basically cannot evolve their form, because boards and shareholders will rarely agree to leave money on the table for an opaque long view that prioritizes culture over profit.

Been waiting for something like this. Love to see the NATS backend.

I hope it's as good as it sounds. Thanks for open sourcing <3

QuePaxa, nice name. What's happening? with a nod to Paxos.

My bad, the article was fairly general and I thought your question was general as well. Having followed some of the links now, I think your question still stands.

The only way I've found to really force rules is via hooks, and even then I think it's just prompt injection? Maybe some kind of hook/checksum thing to ensure you're running unchanged tests, but as you're pointing out, the agents can get sneaky and do weird stuff if they have write ability.

You need to always be looking for what can be done deterministically and what can't. If it can, write a script or whatever is needed to make that happen. Your agent can help you figure this out. The agent becomes a glue layer for all your scripts. Use LLM judgement as an extra layer on top of a mechanical baseline.

> validating that the LLM didn't disable tests it didn't agree with

Provide a test runner and force the agent to call it. Have it emit something if you want evidence.

> I've simply stopped reading reviews at all

This is the way. If I'm traveling I consider Tripadvisor's top lists as things to avoid, and don't use the site otherwise. Bangkok in particular, you can basically walk blindfolded and you'll run into amazing food.

I assume this is written by a UI designer or something, and it certainly feels like "notes" and not a cohesive article. Claiming "The six signals of quality in software" and then listing only user-facing concerns and including subjective items like "Beauty: Is the software as aesthetically pleasing as possible?" is questionable.

I'm interested in quality, but I didn't find these notes enlightening, and couldn't even finish the article.

You can just replace x.com with nitter.net, though their bandwidth sucks for media playback.

Thanks for this tidbit!

> Maybe everyone else is too young to remember left-pad

It wasn't that long ago...

FWIW, Go provides a mechanism to abstract the import source, so you can use a vanity domain under your control that resolves to your host of choice.

Factorio :)

> It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.

It's pretty easy to see that most things above plankton aren't rote automatons. Anyone claiming otherwise just has an agenda to sell.

This is almost the same article as https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-single-naked-black-hole-rew...

> Are they worth the cost/tradeoffs?

No. Lighting up the night is an abomination. Reflect Orbital can go fuck themselves.

the factory must grow

Ride a bike.

How could I forget oatmeal stout, I love it also! Nice one!

Don't worry, it's still that too.

Binary compression unpacked by OCR? This is the stuff of nightmares. So cursed, and yet...

I don't drink oat milk, but man I love oats. Oatmeal is so good. Oatmeal cookies, oat crumble, goo balls, muesli, overnight oats, rolled, steel-cut, all of it. I make oatmeal sourdough bread that's like a meal in a slice, literally just put leftover oatmeal in the dough.

Just waving the flag for team-oat here. Thanks Canadian oat farmers!

I don't do anything with full session transcripts, but I find value when Claude writes a memory.

I don't actually want Claude to have those memories, but they often point to gaps in my harness. I'll occasionally sweep the memories, pick out what should go into the harness or CLAUDE.md, then delete the memories.

ZSA Voyager sticks to these pretty nicely: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMHT5LZ5

Yes really. Just because the initial rush ended in scam bros, doesn't mean there's no value in the underlying tech. You don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

The entire real estate industry is disgusting.