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That's not the full picture though, because other players can hit you with items, and it's sometimes unavoidable.

If you get hit by a blue shell with a build fully optimized for speed at the cost of acceleration, it's likely to cost you the race.

tkcloughon A Faster Alternative to Jq

Just because you haven't seen it hallucinate on these tasks doesn't mean it can't.

When I'm deciding what tool to use, my question is "does this need AI?", not "could AI solve this?" There's plenty of cases where its hard to write a deterministic script to do something, but if there is a deterministic option, why would you choose something that might give you the wrong answer? It's also more expensive.

The jq script or other script that an LLM generates is way easier to spot check than the output if you ask it to transform the data directly, and you can reuse it.

tkcloughon In praise of –dry-run

I like the timer idea. I do something kinda similar by prompting the user to enter some short random code to continue.

I guess the goal for both is to give the user a chance to get out of autopilot, and avoid up-arrowing and re-executing.

tkcloughon Useful patterns for building HTML tools

I'm a big fan of using this kind of thing at work. Rather than setting up a web server or packaging something into an installer, I just pop the bundled HTML file on a shared drive.

The CDN approach works, but I don't love depending on some third-party service just so your app continues working. Instead, I like using vite with vite-plugin-singlefile. This lets you package your JS and CSS into a single HTML: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vite-plugin-singlefile

tkcloughon MUMPS

I work in MUMPS daily and this is such an odd take to me. It's entirely possible to write very readable and maintainable MUMPS, and I find it fairly pleasant to write. There's lots of poorly written code, sure, but you can write bad software in any language.

tkcloughon No longer writing my own damn HTML

This is really neat, I didn't know the browser would serve a page that had been generated by XSL. Is this just a hack, or is it an intended feature?

I notice, for example, that this doesn't include a <!DOCTYPE html> at the top, but it still functions because browsers accommodate incorrectly formatted HTML.