Dan

Often the true question isn't "Can I do it?" but rather "Do I want to do it?". Self-control and self-discipline are tough but, eventually, a well-trained mind can tame the instinct and silence the impulse... and conquer anything.

Are you tallish, Ben? I tried both and I found the Embody to have poor lumbar support for me. The Aeron M fitted well, better lumbar support, but I didn’t have enough time with it for a long session test. The waterfall seat of the Aeron is definitely nice and reduces pressure on the thighs. Mesh is non-negotiable for US SE heat lol

@BenjDicken I have Aeron. @jasonlong has Embody Pick your warrior

What's the best $2k office chair and why? Aeron vs Embody

@DavidKPiano That’s all fun and games until people actually start suffering damage from such software or getting hurt in one way or the other. Bugs do impact real people in real ways.

Not reviewing the code is just laziness Not talking about text/styles or reading every single token; any code relevant to the main critical application logic should be reviewed Good engineers can pattern-match large blocks of code and OK it in a few seconds. Don't be lazy.

@mscccc I had to wear a jacket. It was a bit chilly at 80F in Florida.

Almost 7pm, still light out. Walked outside in shorts today. We're so back.

@VicVijayakumar I also context switch a lot working as a cross-team engineer. I have a “workspace” repo with all my Jira tickets, memories, specs, notes, etc. to keep track of the task at hand and create a breadcrumbs trail of what I’ve been doing. It helps a lot to retake any task weeks later.

I no longer keep a separate document open for this btw. I just tell a model running in a terminal and it keeps track of my projects, todos, kudos, etc.

I agree. The pressure to use AI prompted me to dust off my O’Reilly Learn membership and spend more time reviewing architecture fundamentals and learning new things from humans. Sadly, there is growing slop in their library. You can tell from miles away the book was “vibe written”. It’s even more frustrating lol

Vibe coding things you have 0 knowledge about is so frustrating. I’ve given up trying to vibe code a unity game. It’s too frustrating when you don’t know what to ask or how to direct the LLM. Gonna spend a week speed learning unity and then get back to building the game

@chriszeuch @samhuckaby “Just trust the AI, bro”

@samlambert Sam is the CEO of PlanetBased 😎 Big W for both PS and Drizzle

This is the important part. Lately we've seen a number of cynical attempts for companies to steal open source projects. It's disgusting behavior. Drizzle has its own independent roadmap and PlanetScale supports the project by giving the maintainers financial security.

@niklas_wortmann @elmd_ His answer is… Eclipse.

@elmd_ My answer would probably shock you 🤣

Cursor vs. Claude Code vs. VSCode Which one do you choose and why? Genuinely curious to hear reasons why you choose one over the others.

Design is infinitely harder than engineering just on the grounds alone of Design being subject to human perception. Code works or doesn’t work. 0 or 1. For Design, it’s a wide spectrum where everyone has a different place for that 0 and that 1. Getting stakeholders to agree on Design is hard and requires immense patience.

if you think coding is difficult, wait until you try design

Your videos explaining architecture patterns for the backend layer on Netflix is what helped me realize that I enjoy backend work much more than frontend because it feels like an every expanding problem layer that while challenging is more stable than the swirling vortex of entropy that frontend is. I was kinda sad that I found that spark maybe too late but became determined to spend my spare time reading books, looking at source code, system design, etc. to level up properly that backend spark into a fire.

I have been thinking about this a lot. I think for a great many of engineers, the ones who did it because they loved it only to discover that money was in fact at the end of the rainbow found both the journey and the destination satisfying. In fact, I think I can argue with authority that the destination was only satisfying as the journey was difficult. The hard-fought evenings spent toiling away on an idea and codebase that slowly gives way to your vision was an incredible experience. The group of people that fell into this category of hard-fought journey and destination we will call them tinkerers. One thing tinkerers have always hated is the already known problems. The journey is clear as day. The obstacles minor inconveniences. Its purely a matter of typing the solution into the terminal. This is also why I think so many of this group goes out and does open source, or starts companies. Work largely falls into this category with few exceptions. From this reason is why I largely find UI work soul sucking. I know the solution, its a matter of just looking up the details and putting it into my editor. yawn. CSS, flex box this, grid that, put the tailwind classes in the bag. To me, the LLM software world is with little to no journey and discovery. Its more of simply taking my high level idea and just formulating it into testable, atomic chunks that can be verified. I have traded my favorite part, discovery and raw creation, with itemized list of TODOs and patience and "No Mistakes." To this, every morning from 6 to 9 I simply just hand code every thin. even UI things. It is because I want journey and discovery and raw creation. Maybe one day comes and its just so futile that I stop this. But for now, I still see such great value in this. I see such better thought through products. Because slowing down and truly thinking through everything. The architecture, the design, everything is an expression of discovery and creation. And I love it. I am sure there will come a day, maybe even in the next 6 months where I change my mind. For now, I pursue the love of the game intentionally. I do also believe that there exists people who get the same joy I got from building with tears and sweat by prompting LLMs. I am positive of it. I just don't understand how. But people love UI work. I also don't understand that.

@niklas_wortmann @elmd_ WebStorm and Cursor fighting for my poor MacBook’s memory:

@elmd_ Looks good to me 😬

I don't know about you but this doesn't look right...

There's people salivating at the idea of not having to hire expensive engineers again to build their ivory towers. They forget that AI is making software even more complex, faster than before, requiring a team of human engineers to understand, untangle, refine, maintain, etc. A team. Because writing software in isolation is dangerous and a "pack of subagents" without human-in-the-loop mindful, pragmatic checks is the equivalent of one. It's easy to get impressed by GenAI party tricks to create small apps. But, I have yet to see LLMs one-shot working Cypress tests in a giant project with decades in the making. 😏

There seems to be an unspoken feeling that we’re racing towards a world where only a small percentage of developers stay employed This is not so. There will always be cuts along the way, but people who want to be in the game will be there - you don’t need to be influencer-level

@elmd_ Are you using Claude Code to access Opus?

@getDanArias Interesting. I have tried myself and it was rather disappointing all in all.

Man, once you try Opus 4.6 fast mode, there is almost no turning back. I just want that speed but oh boy... 6x more expensive? It's prolly not worth it but it makes you fly like there's no tomorrow.

@simeonGriggs Can I be an early angel investor? The biblically accurate kind.

This tweet's about to cross 30 likes I'm thrilled to announce $10m in funding for the distribution of markdown files.

Can anyone explain why we're not installing skills from npm so we actually get versioning and updates? Downloading plain text files to your project exactly once feels insane.

@samhuckaby That’s a vibe: write the tests with the AI and TDD the way to implementation. Works fine for backend and with modular, focused files. In frontend, it’s a toss. AI made me want to be backend even more.

@getDanArias Totally! I had it add these ten 😅

Wow, just adding unit tests makes new code generation 10 times better even if it's just a few

After I shared my Cursor token count for 2025, I started to get tagged in random crypto coin posts. No, I don’t have 7 billion tokens in financial currency, bots, stop tagging me, please. This platform is full of bots and spam.

This is me. I interview the agents like I were interviewing a job candidate to understand what works and doesn't work for them. If they fail, tell me why. I benchmark my prompts through different models so that I can get a resilient solution that works well. For now, I am in the "AI for pair programming" wagon of this hype train. I've not had good luck with full delegation or one-shot solutions, for as much as I've tried lol

@DavidKPiano Yeah, I'm unconvinced by specific tools - what matters is spending time with the core models and coding agent patterns such that you can build intuition over what works and what doesn't

The "you're falling behind on AI" crowd is weird. The whole point of this tech is that things get 10x easier, not harder. Complicated agent/prompting patterns get replaced by better models, simpler patterns, and plug-and-play tools. Catching up takes a day, not months.

@ThePrimeagen Using GPT 5.1/5.2 in Cursor is the fastest way to drain your wallet in 2026 😅

guys we are about to the "opus 4.5 is trash, best friends with 5.2" phase....