David Brady

You might have ADD if

My coworkers have to put up with this every day. I'm pretty sure they go home and pray to the gods of At Will Employment every night. (If you're not a developer, that file is encrypted and intentionally not human readable.) 🤣

Last week on the podcast I talked about how a past employer had a disaster recovery plan to stay up and running if our datacenter got hit by a meteor by having a redundant DC, and every six months we swapped primary DCs to practice failover. I got challenged with "come on, how often do meteors actually hit a datacenter". 8 days later Iran bombed the AWS datacenter in the UAE. That aged like milk still fresh from the carton.

27 years ago, The Pragmatic Programmer taught us, "it's all text, learn your tools, and learn a new programming language every year." It's 2026. It's all still true, but for a few details. It's all text. Learn your tools. And learn a new LLM every year. I don't mean toy with it or hop around. I mean learn it. Pick one and stick with it. Use Claude until you understand how it feels more creative and present to the human in the room. Use Grok until you can predict when dry wit and an allergy to bullshit will reign. Dive into Gemini until that deep research librarian mode feels natural. Copilot and Perplexity and DeepSeek have flavors, too. Pick one and learn it. ChatGPT, too, I guess. I don't talk about my exes.

Ohhhh, god. These ARE my monkeys. This IS my circus.

Me to a CW getting his ass kicked today: "This is the shit that builds character. The problem is that getting character built sucks ass."

Him: "Yo momma so fat, weather satellites have to ask her to get out of the picture." Me: "For you, it was the worst category 5 hurricane of your life. For her, it was a Taco Tuesday." Why are we like this

Best friends are the ones who lovingly know how to take it exactly too far enough. I told my best friend today I was so sorry to hear that the (long ago) death of his mother was being investigated for possible foul play and that they were exhuming the body... and then attached an orbital photo of the Bingham Canyon Mine. We're in our 50's and we still do yo momma so fat jokes.

My next infoproduct is going to be called How To Yell At An AI To Get It To Do What You Want and I'm going to make a million zillion dollars

OH: "The AI needs you." Me: "That... is a sentence that just got said..."

@NathanpmYoung I found a whole new class of behaviors when I switched to Texas peach.

Has anyone tested if Claude gives worse answers if people have small typos? Should accurate typing be a key llm skill? Should I move to voice typing because it makes fewer typos?

THIS! Today I needed to rebase 8 PRs in an exhaustively tedious codebase. Rather than write a skill and let it go think, I just say "write me a bash script that checks out main, pulls, bundles, runs migrations, jumps back to my branch, rebases, runs specs, and pushes." Worked a treat, and once the script was in place, 0 more tokens were ever required.

Don't burn tokens on fixing things that the AI isn't good at fixing. Instead have the AI build a tool that can fix them quickly without burning tokens.

@Gingerblast @SandyofCthulhu Demon child! ...Hear, hear. GLP walked my type 2 back to early- to pre- to non-. Whichever of us goes to hell first, save the other a seat, yeah?

@SandyofCthulhu Promise I won't take offense if someone wants to cure my diabetes

I remember when people who claimed to like science were in favor of science bettering people's lives.

@andrewchen I would like to invite you to a dinner party

i’ve learned that when you both: 1) read old books 2) and also X every day then over time you sound like a crazy person at dinner parties I’ve tested this empirically

YES! I ran the weirdest possible Tiefling: one who *wasn't* rebelling against his infernal blood. Lawful Evil, missionary for Glasya. I was up front with the other players, "His schtick is he wants to rule by making you *loyal*." Overtly manipulative, but honest about it. And yes, that compliment doesn't ever get old.

Being called pretty is nice and all, but have you ever been told that your RPG character was someone's favorite ever to play alongside? Someone said that to me last month and I'm still riding that high

@paulg This is closely related to "style" for me: "a predilection to solve a problem in a certain way". Until you have taste you don't have a style, you just have a series of happy accidents.

A lot of having taste about something is just caring about it enough to be honest with yourself, so that you can get past "I like what I like" to "Is this actually good?"

@HostOfMeta That's a false root but a charming one. Makes me want to see indivisible as closer to indivi-sibling 😄

Language hides the darnedest: indivi-dual: it can't be split, but still comes from two like the atom, smallest possible unit; then subatoms

I love it when Claude absolutely understands the "wrong answers only" assignment

Me, trying to justify some off-spec work: "I think I might be able to slash 15 minutes off our deploys. I'd like to time box this for an hour; I'm pretty sure I will be carried out on the shoulders of a cheering throng." My Team Lead, saying yes: "And fed grapes along the way."

@elvenmaidinn My heart is so heavy to hear this. I have dear friends on both sides of this struggle. Hang in there and know that you are on the right side of imaginary medieval fantasy history. Ao bless

Unfortunately, the moment has come when the silence I’ve tried so desperately to maintain must shatter. I never imagined, truly never dreamed, that I would one day be forced to gather every screenshot, every timestamped message, every buried confession, every contradictory statement… and carefully lay them out in cold, undeniable Google Docs for the world to see. I never wanted to become the person who does this. I never wanted to be the one holding the receipts. Yet here I am. What happened last year wasn’t just “drama.” It was something far heavier, far more deliberate, far more cruel than most people ever realized. Behind the pretty filters and the carefully curated apologies and the public displays of innocence, there were choices made, repeated, calculated choices, that left deep wounds I’m still bleeding from in places no one can see. I’ve spent months wrestling with this. Nights where I stared at the ceiling asking myself if speaking would make me just as bad, if staying quiet would make me complicit. I’ve carried the weight alone long enough. The gaslighting, the rewriting of events, the slow erasure of what really happened, it stops working when the truth starts screaming inside your chest. So yes. It hurts. It physically hurts to do this publicly. It feels like tearing open something that was barely scabbed over. But allowing the narrative to remain poisoned, allowing the version where I was the villain or the unstable one or the one who “just couldn’t handle it”… that hurts worse. Infinitely worse. I didn’t ask for this chapter. But I will not let it be written by the people who broke me and then pretended they were the ones bleeding. I have attached an Google Doc link in following message.