Adam T. Croft

I am a very large fan of heavy metal. But, in the humor of only God himself, nothing locks me in to get great work done that I'm proud of like a spa sound bath playlist. I don't make the rules, I just experience them 🤷

This is utterly fascinating. We’ve known code written by AI is harder to untangle. It appears this is the case with writing as well. Tricia is an editor and she says that when an author submits work that is written by AI, she has a much harder time editing it. It’s all one interconnected black-box piece of writing that is not amenable to change. Whereas she finds that human writing, while seemingly messier, is actually much more structurally straightforward. My theory as to why this is is that LLMs think one token at a time. And after every token, they essentially look back and ask, “have I said the thing the prompt wants me to say?” If not, it keeps elucidating. The result is tight chain of thought writing that requires each preceding token to make sense of the next. Whereas human writing starts from a pre-language idea in the author’s head, and looks forward many sentences and paragraphs ahead to approximate the author’s intent. It’s somewhat fuzzy. But I think LLMs fundamentally “think” in a much different way than humans. They are certainly not useless. But I think it’s a grave mistake to equate them with human intelligence.

@sonicbarber @MarathonTheGame Get Claude to write your presentation for you while you play Marathon (kidding, kidding)

Finish writing presentation on @MarathonTheGame or play @MarathonTheGame ? Hmmmmmm

I don't know what this says about me - but my current relaxation past time is blasting music (tonight is @Pitchshifter , last week was ODB) and playing Crime Scene Cleaner. Other people read books, I digitally clean crime scenes 🤷

@wookash_podcast By the logic "licensed IP == stay away" I'd need an explanation on his stance for Goldeneye, NBA JAM, PS4/PS5 Spiderman, lots of Star Wars and LEGO games... I didn't play the old HP titles, but still 🤔 at that take.

My dear friend has mocked me for liking old Harry Potter games (1 & 2, though 3 is ok as well). Were these games any good, or is it just nostalgia? His stance is "if it wasn't well-known IP you wouldn't like it". He generally stays away from games that licensed IP - HP, LOTR, Warhammer, etc. Cause he wants to play games for **their core game ideas**, not to play "reskins" of popular game mechanics with known characters. But I'm like, bro, Harry Potter 2, with its all secrets, silver cards, quidditch, was crazy good! Had so much mystery, the magic was basic, yet it was exactly what 7/8/15 year old me wanted. Does anyone remember these games, and being older at that time, can wage in, and offer their take - were they plain games with "stolen" / "adapted" mechanics from other works, or were there original games, that happened to license popular IP?

There's no better way to write code really than while screaming "PLAS-TIC.... BAGINTHESEAAAAAA"

I die inside every time I perform a random miracle to get a coworker out of a jam with GPT Codex, but run into the dumbest code when I'd like to use it for more serious and large scale infrastructure. It's not a miracle to, but it loooooves to look like one.

@GojiraMusic all day every day and twice on Sunday

Rediscovering how to play has been one of the most important things of my last few years. Guitar, drums, BJJ, kayaking, fun with people are all things that feed me which allow me to feed into work and other people.

Now playing @theyare68. Sad they're wrapping it up, but stoked to see them again in June.

Just tried our new local Raising Cane's. My verdict: Bojangles > Raising Cane's New life goal: become rich enough to franchise Bojangles & Biscuitville in the PNW 🤣

Marathon, our new extraction shooter @bungie is free to play for this weekend’s server slam starting Thursday 💪 More details: bungie.net/7/en/News/Arti…

It’s wild how crazy the swings can be from “wow this is completely overwritten code” to “wow that’s… I hadn’t thought of doing that, that’s great” when using Codex. I’m constantly over here debating the value-add in a given context.

How is it that every @Convergecult album becomes my new favorite Converge album?. “Bad Faith” is such a sick song.

@jamonholmgren Yes, and also from anecdotal personal experience - a LOT of modern AAA devs don’t code at all but implement their own content. Few want to learn C++, much less its eccentricities. Plus they gravitate towards node graphs.

It still surprises me how many game devs who are using Unreal engine will use blueprints in rather than code. No snark intended, but rather a speculative comment: I think it might be because C++ really isn’t a good primary language for working in day to day. It’s super fast and has broad support and is very powerful, but it really and truly sucks from a productivity standpoint, and is far too massive (and permissive) of a language to use for normal scripting, and too many non-obvious footguns. So blueprints allow you to essentially have a narrower scoped scripting language on top of C++. That’s my theory. As always, I could be wrong; often I’ll throw out ideas to get corrections from people who have deeper experience and I learn things from that.

I would say AI isn’t as helpful as I’d like it to be, but Codex just used @steipete’s gog CLI to download and categorize a bunch of receipts sitting in my email for taxes 😂 I guess I’ll have to actually have it sort through my email hell now…

Commence the great personal github repo cleaning of 2026...

I’ve started an experiment where I’m having Codex develop audio plugins for me overnight. Right now I’m having it create JSFX for REAPER, just based on some simple prompts stored in the repo. Download plugins (only one right now) if you use REAPER: github.com/adamtcroft/nir…

@LowLevelTweets @ThePrimeagen Now I need this to be the new PrimaGames 😂

@ThePrimeagen I would play the Primaverse game

I AM LOOKING FOR HELP (paid position): * I need help with Unity / Unreal -- I want to revamp and recreate / change my scenes and i want to create a whole universe here. If you know anyone / you want to do this, let me know, this would be a longer term relationship. IF THIS SOUNDS GOOD: Fill this in -- docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

@jamonholmgren It’s… ironic. In my LLM experiments, I’m only more convinced that area skill and expertise are gaining in importance (versus the hyperbolic “all our jobs are gone!”) LLMs output isn’t remotely deterministic - so it requires a capable driver. Love your thoughts ❤️

Bit by bit, we are starting to see what the new AI assisted software development world is going to look like for the next several years. My current (still evolving) take: - Massive unleashing of experimental work, proofs of concept, rough drafts This should lead to a huge boost in the amount and creativity of software products that come to market, at the cost of a sudden increase in noise, a veritable din - Significant decline in average code quality Some code gets better, a lot gets worse, and the limitations of the current technology and unlocking less experienced developers to create software will lead to a near crisis in poorly built products in the near term - Large proliferation of tools As we scramble to adapt, experimentation and perspectives will lead to a vast array of possible solutions, each with their own sets of tradeoffs. Reminds me of the early days of Web 2.0, where there was a new framework every week and they all sucked - Some emerging best practices Over the past 6 weeks I have talked to many very experienced developers (often 1 on 1 video calls), and we are now starting to circle some common threads for AI-assisted software dev best practices (these are off the cuff, so don’t expect perfection): 1. Slow down, learn the tools, figure out the tradeoffs 2. Quality still matters when it matters; often, the existing models and tools fall short of maintaining that quality on larger code bases 3. The developer is responsible for the code they ship 4. Documentation (via skills, tasks, or just markdown docs) is tremendously helpful, but you should also understand it, not just rely on the AI to 5. High level architecture is still an area where a human with a lot of experience can add a ton of value 6. AI is not a substitute for good taste (and caring about things) 7. Some techniques are locally productive and globally harmful (more on this below) 8. The bottleneck is in review, understanding, and higher level systems architecture more so than coding speed. 9. Some developers are more adept than others at various parts of this new value chain. Current teams are full of developers vetted for and hired to do one job who are facing a significantly different way of doing it. 10. Coding itself might get done a different way, but the fundamental engineering patterns are often still extremely important. Not in cases where it’s just about satisfying some developer love of symmetry, but definitely in domains like data modeling and the like. More on local optimization vs global concerns: agent chains like Ralph and aggressive code gen can feel incredibly fast, but tend to accumulate inconsistencies and tech debt over time. Speed at a file/feature level does not guarantee speed at the overall system level, and I have felt this personally when I’ve leaned too hard on such tools. - We will learn more as time moves on. Be kind We are adapting, evolving, playing with the tools, sharing, feeling the bruises when we get it wrong. There are educators trying to stay ahead of it and provide value. There are normal devs just trying to make a living, and stay relevant. None of this is as unique to you as you might think — I hear from others, and they’re feeling the same pressures. Be kind to each other