bslatner

@housecor I usually ask it BEFORE I move onto the next thing. "This is basically what I'm gonna do, should I do it in this context or start a new one." Codex is about 50/50 on telling me when to split.

Problem: I'm not sure if I should clear context before my next prompt. Solution: I ask Claude if I should've cleared context. This improves my intuition over time. Example: Prompt 1: "Recover my corrupted blog by pulling files from the Internet Archive." Prompt 2: "Extract each post's content into markdown." Should I have cleared context before step 2? I wasn't sure, so I just asked Claude (I used /btw so it could keep working while answering this side question):

@unclebobmartin @garybernhardt As someone who has recently gotten used to being the "old guy" on the team, I am flabbergasted that you started doing this 5 years before I was born 🤣

I got my first job as a paid programmer in 1968. At that time programming looked like writing code on coding forms with pencils and then handing those forms to key punch operators who punched the cards. Then we would take those cards to the Computer room and hand them to an operator who would run a compile. The cards were read into a card reader and more cards would be punched. Those cards were the binary that were subsequently placed back into the card reader. Then the operator would push some buttons on the front control panel and the program would execute. The first few years of my career were involved with either punched cards or paper tape. The editing terminal was always a piece of paper with a pencil. It was only after a few years that I was able to use a CRT display. Even then the main editing terminal was a piece of paper with a pencil. But we would then painstakingly type that code into the CRT display. The source code was stored on magnetic tape, which was slow and error prone, but better than punched cards. A few years later, the source code was finally stored on discs. The discs were slow and big and ponderous. But they were better than magnetic tape. We were finally able to edit on the CRT displays. That editing was slow and ponderous, and mostly line oriented, but it was better than previously. We stopped using paper and pencil as the primary editing tool. Compiles generally took many minutes — sometimes hours. A few years later, and now we’re in the 90s, memory got big enough, and the discs got small and fast enough that compiles that used to take an hour could be done in a few minutes. We were able to use editors like vi, or even eMacs. In the 2000s, we left the editor world for the IDE world. I chose InteliJ for my IDE and I used that right up until five months ago. I know it’s controversial to say this, but IDEs were generally better than editors; even than eMacs. (Well, maybe ;-) Now I don’t use now anything but a terminal window. And maybe sometimes I bring up some file in text mate. The changes in programmer experience over the last six decades have been enormous and radical. Every one of them was good. This one is no different.

I started programming computers in 1996-1997. In 2025, it looked a lot like it did in the 90s. You used a Unix shell and you edited files in vim, of course. Or Emacs; we're all friends here. Now I just want to know what programming looks like in... 2028.

@ShawnWildermuth Maybe. I've been experimenting with this: just letting the agent create simple DTOs and populating them directly with SQL queries via Dapper. No layer between the caller that needs the data and the SQL. Uses fewer tokens, easier for me to find stuff if I have to dig manually.

Question: If we can use AI to build a codebase, does this change the idea of how we would use ORMs? Without the hard work of manually building queries to read and update, is it time to just build with just SQL?

Konstantin does not deny the West's past sins. His point is that today Western societies have the most morally advanced values and institutions on Earth. They corrected historical evils like slavery, extended rights to everyone, and built the freest and most tolerant societies in history. Pointing to past horrors does not refute this. It simply dodges the comparison that matters now. "Where would you rather live?" is the ultimate empirical test. Your thread never names a single current society that is morally superior for a Black woman (or anyone) in terms of safety, opportunity, legal equality, or tolerance. Because there isn't one that matches the West on the metrics that matter today.

You said Western societies ended slavery "without bloodshed." Haiti would like a word. The Haitian Revolution, 1791 to 1804. Enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, France's most profitable colony, which produced 40% of Europe's sugar and more than half its coffee, rose up, fought the French colonial army, fought a British expeditionary force of 20,000 troops, fought Napoleon's army, and won. They established the first Black republic in the history of the world. The Western response to this bloodless, voluntary, enlightened abolition was: France imposed an indemnity of 150 million gold francs, later reduced to 90 million, which Haiti was forced to pay as the price of being recognized as a sovereign nation. As compensation to the French slave owners whose human property had liberated itself. Haiti finished paying that debt in 1947. The United States refused to recognize Haiti diplomatically until 1862, and only then because the Southern states had seceded and were no longer in Congress to block it. The West's response to the one case where enslaved people ended slavery for themselves, through their own revolutionary violence, was to economically strangle the resulting country for 150 years. Tell me again about voluntary, bloodless abolition. Tell me again about Western tolerance.

Konstantin, you asked a Black woman where she'd rather live than Britain or America or Canada. Let's take Britain as your example of tolerant, slavery-ending Western excellence. Britain did not end slavery voluntarily. Britain ended the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 after decades of organized abolitionist pressure, slave rebellions across the Caribbean, most consequentially Haiti in 1791, and the growing calculation that wage labor was becoming more economically efficient than chattel slavery in certain contexts. When Britain "abolished" slavery in its colonies in 1833, it paid £20 million in compensation. Not to the enslaved. To the enslavers. The people who had been worked and beaten and raped and bred like livestock for generations received nothing. Their enslavers received the equivalent of £17 billion in today's money, funded by British taxpayers. A debt so large that British citizens were still paying it off in 2015. You read that correctly. British taxpayers were paying off the debt incurred compensating slave owners until 2015. So when you ask a Black woman where she would rather live, the answer she gives, if she says Britain, is not an endorsement of British moral superiority. It is a statement about which available option causes her the least harm. Those are not the same thing. And you know the difference. You just find it more comfortable not to say it.

@housecor @dizlexic Same. I find codex to be much better at making plans and architecture. Claude is better at implementing the plans. So I'm switching between both all the time.

@dizlexic Ah, I don't only use Claude. I enjoy Codex and Copilot as well, and I switch between from time to time

Problem: Claude often writes small Playwright tests that mock the backend, when one e2e test is simple and effective. Solution: Tell Claude to unify tests where it can. Example: Claude created 3 separate tests for add, edit, and delete. I said: "Tweak @tests/admin.spec.ts to test add, edit, and delete in a single test. Don't mock." Result: A single "atomic" test that adds a new record, edits the record, and then deletes the record. Less test code, more confidence, and fewer page loads. Claude even summarized the tradeoffs:

@theo So, this is fun, but can you make T3 Code stop launching a visible console on Windows every 15 minutes when it launches, inexplicably, tzutil.exe? 🤣

To prevent "programmatic use", Claude Code may now request webcam access to assure user is present when prompting

@AishwaryaDevv @yawaramin Meanwhile I'm over here with my Jekyll-generated static HTML site 🤣

For people who keep asking how to deploy a simple static HTML personal blog: 1. Buy a .io domain for $70/year 2. Provision 3 AWS EC2 instances 3. Setup a multi-region Kubernetes cluster 4. Write 4,000 lines of Terraform config 5. Deploy a high-availability Kafka event stream 6. Rewrite the backend API in Rust 7. Containerize everything with Docker 8. Set up Grafana and Prometheus for observability 9. Implement an enterprise-grade CI/CD pipeline 10. Configure a distributed Redis caching layer 11. Setup PagerDuty alerts for 99.999% uptime 12. Realize the site only gets 1 visitor a month 13. Forget how to center a div in CSS 14. Abandon the project completely

@HiteshRohira15 @eoslick @theo Right? When I get into some new code, it's literally the first thing that I try to learn.

@eoslick @theo > Most engineers can’t do this I am surprised to hear this, I would have thought this was the bare minimum?

Coding with agents is a trap, and we all fell for it.

Just last week I had to break it out to debug something that Claude wrote. When presented with all the inputs, Claude just couldn't find it. Turns out it was a race condition. As an experiment, I turned Codex loose on it. It DID find the race condition after burning a half million tokens. Yes, I did take this as a sign that it needed refactoring and more tests 🤣

@scottrudy @ThePrimeagen I can’t remember the last time I used a debugger.

without googling, i still cannot figure out how to copy and paste on a mac into: 1. the provided Terminal app (which sucks) 2. Ghostty. C-V does nothing, C-v goes into escape insertion (expected). I refuse to google this and it should just be obvious...

@saltnburnem @KostjaPalovic I mean, that's happened to me, but claude --resume usually just picks right up where it left off.

@KostjaPalovic Everything I asked to do with the questions I asked were all lost in the terminal after it crashed

Soooo Claude doesn't save any memory or context if the app crashes you are using it in? Is that so?

@nicbarkeragain I haven't had an error like that since the 90s...but on that occasion, every programmer in the building was standing behind my staring at my screen trying to figure it out 🤣

Just experienced this in C++ and was briefly very confused about what was going on:

@HSRdirector @SwiftOnSecurity Ladders have more warning labels per square inch than anything I've ever seen. And yet people still do stupid shit with them.

I’ve witnessed a lot of harm done to my patients from various expected things like cigarettes, guns etc but I never imagined how much harm I would see in my adult patients from ladders. LADDERS. so much devastation

@wwortheotherww @PstafarianPrice @Her_Nonymous_D My daughter's dorm has the number for dealing with lockouts on a corkboard in the hall. I'm guessing it happens a lot 😜

@PstafarianPrice @Her_Nonymous_D Half of campus security’s job is helping people who got locked out of their dorm room

Parents, I need real opinions on this because I’m genuinely torn. Imagine your daughter is away at college, living in a shared dorm. One day she steps out of her room and accidentally leaves her key inside. It happens. She’s not being reckless, just human. While she’s out, her roommate comes back, drops her things off, and then leaves again… but locks the door behind her. Now your daughter is stuck outside, locked out of her own room, probably stressed, maybe embarrassed, trying to figure out what to do next. So here’s the question, who do you even get upset with in that situation? On one hand, your daughter forgot her key. That’s on her. It’s one of those small mistakes that turns into a big inconvenience, and part of growing up is learning to double-check things like that. But on the other hand, the roommate knew it was a shared space. Would it have hurt to at least check if…

After many tokens burned on both sides of the conversation, it's decided I am worthy of human attention 😜

Find myself in the unique position of using @OpenAI support chatbot to talk to codex about a sandbox problem. If you guys are listening, using codex with the dotnet tool chain on Windows is a complete shit show. Hire me to help you fix it 🤣

@reborn_dre @hatch_willow @ChristianHeiens Let's just start with the patriot act and work our way forward. I don't support political violence, but you're deluded if you don't think Congress has legislated away rights.

@hatch_willow @ChristianHeiens First off, you're defending political violence. Just know that you're doing that. What rights and liberty have any Americans lost?

>The George Floyd riots inflicted more than $2 billion in damages, injured over 2,000 police officers across America, and resulted in more than 20 deaths >After the Dobbs decision leaked, Wisconsin Family Action, Buffalo CompassCare, and Gresham pregnancy-center were all firebombed by Leftists >18 year old GOP door knocker Cayler Ellingson was intentionally run over and murdered by a Leftist in 2022 >An armed Leftist traveled across the country to Justice Kavanaugh’s home and attempted to murder him after the Dobbs leak >Last year, Leftists firebombed Tesla dealerships all over the country in retaliation for DOGE >In July, a Leftist opened fire on ICE agents outside one of their facilities in Alvarado, Texas, injuring a local police officer >Another Leftist opened fire on ICE agents in Dallas last September >Charlie Kirk was publicly assassinated by a Leftist >Donald Trump has survived at least three assassination attempts, all of which were made by Leftists You’re right that it’s not a “both sides” problem. Leftists are bloodthirsty lunatics who want to kill their enemies because they’ve long since run out of arguments.

@Pvcperin @mattvanswol @Riley_Gaines_ Yeah, at my wife's recent ER visit, they charged $7500 for an abdominal CT. Their price transparency site lists it at $3500. So now I gotta get on the phone and deal with that. Sigh.

@mattvanswol @Riley_Gaines_ 8,000 for a CT scan? Lol. It costs 500 bucks tops.

It's been 7 months since we had our baby and we're still receiving unexplained hospital bills in the mail. Hardly ever an adequate description of services. Just a QR code to pay online. It feels intentionally confusing and difficult to get answers. We want price transparency.

@plankers @SwiftOnSecurity I was amused by the whole story, but got a big belly laugh out of "Tevye" 🤣🤣🤣

Just about 17 years ago, a couple coworkers and I decided to put a decommissioned Dell PowerEdge 2650 on the roof. Why? Because we were curious, and it was to become scrap metal. We did absolutely nothing to weatherproof it, beyond setting it on two bricks, facing it away from the prevailing wind, putting a drip loop in the cabling, and using fiber networking so we wouldn't fry anything if it got zapped. Ran Linux, plotting its own sensor data via ipmitool, and presenting it via a web page served from the box itself. We put load on it using SETI@Home. It ran for about two months up there, even surviving 6" of snow, until a really gnarly thunderstorm drove water into the SCSI backplane and it shorted out. Continued running for a few more weeks, though, until not being able to write to disk was finally too much. Did not come back from a power cycle. Its hostname was Tevye, of course.

I get that frequently interfaces are used in TS to describe the shape of data vs. a functionality contract, but it does/can serve BOTH those purposes. I went and reviewed my TS code from ages past and find that I use IXxxx as the name if it's the latter and just Xxx if it's the former.

@kev_bite @bslatner You don’t. The interface is used to declare the type in TS

The single greatest sign a C# dev wrote your TypeScript: interface IUser {