ncphillips

I work at a 6 year old startup. Essentially every feature and bug fix we’ve shipped in the last year has had LLMs involved. Every project plan involved AI, either for writing or for codebase research. For code review we get AI to do the first pass.

That’s an interesting question, in particular because I don’t think I have a single example

I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down.

Fixed small several bugs last week without even open the editor. It wrote tests that confirmed the bugs, then fixed them. Then I manually confirmed as well.

It built a double entry event log. A single application event produces two logs, one for the person doing the action, one for the person being acted upon.

For a nasty problem we have, we had AI prototype 2 different solutions. Then we reveiewed them as a team. We threw those out but it was very helpful input into our decision making.

jj required a very weird mind shift in how I work, but since it’s clicked I’d never go back. Occasionally it makes easy things a bit awkward, but the amount of hard things it makes easy is incredible. Several patterns of work have become common for me that I would never have done before.

That’s not what this is though.

Do you self host chat?

I don’t know if Gitlab is an industry standard, but I’ve never heard of Forgejo. I worked for a headless CMS company and the only three providers we ever had requests for were GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab. Gitlab is big enough to be generally adopted by governments. I think it’s fair to say it’s at least a lot closer to being an industry standard then Forgejo.

(Aside: I would likely never use Gitlab by choice, and would consider looking into Forgejo)

I just hit my Claude Max limit for the first time _ever_ thanks to workflows lol

Like 90 agents ran to do a code review of a fairly small package I have.

They're really looking for us to increase token usage aren't they?

I feel like using $1.3M/year is a wild outlier. A $200/month Max sub is a pretty cheap way to get quite a lot of benefit.

I’ve recently switched to jj and it is truly amazing. It too about a week for me to “get it”. The tool is amazing but I think there’s way too much emphasis on what it does/allows rather than what benefits it brings to your workflow. If they get that marketing right I could see it growing. If not, I’ll keep using it

It did for sure. And Tailwind absolutely doesn’t need to be done this way. I think this is a correlation-not-causation issue

Same here. It’s super weird take to me now. Maybe if you’re just writing plain HTML and CSS tailwind would be worse, but assuming there’s a component system you’re going to be just fine. The cascade of CSS is such a foot gun. Localized styles work great and tailwind abstracts away hardcoded values with relative ones

We use tailwind and are capable of building accessible websites without any issue. People could make all the same mistakes with CSS for accessibility. It’s the not knowing how to make accessible content that leads to inaccessible content, not the tool you use to implement the styling.

KFC in Japan is not fair.

But I have a workflow I like with git and I can’t see how jj would be better. I’m genuinely curious as to whether it would be or not, but the behaviours people are describing are not things that interest me.

There must be some kind of split in how people work or something. I’ve never had the desire to jump around the git tree. I never squash commits. I basically never stash changes. All the things that people say jj makes easier are things I never even want to do. Not because they’re not easy with git, but because it sounds hard to keep straight in my head.

Okay but why would they use jj when they do trunk-based dev

Where X = something I’ve never wanted to do

I’m not a fit expert by any means. The workflows being described do not appeal to me but not because of the way fit works. They sound confusing and I don’t understand what benefit I’m getting out of them. Like, it’s a solution to a problem I’m not sure exists (for me)

Yeah I legit do not understand the appeal. I’m willing to be wrong but it’s not clicking with me at all

I have not had this experience as badly with Laravel. Their libraries seem much more stable to me. We've gone up 5 major versions of Laravel over the last year and a half and it was pretty simple for each major version.

Minecraft is already nostalgia. It reminds me of starting university 16 years ago.

a new hot shot would show up every month and be gone the next when they got bored or frustrated when nobody thought they were special

I don't know much about film industry, and I have a ton of brainfog from being sick today.

Could you say more? What made them a hotshot? They thought they were like, creative geniuses with digital film or something?

Yeah same. The idea that you'd be merging code to `main` that isn't ready to deploy is crazy to me, but that doesn't mean you need a `develop` and `prod` branch. The main + 1-layer of branches has generally been totally sufficient. We either deploy to branch-preview environment or we just test it locally.

the primary branching model the vast, vast majority of people use on Git.

it's just a historical fact that's not really debatable.

Over my last 15 years of software dev, I have _never_ heard of anyone actually using Gitflow in their codebase.

I'm not saying you're wrong. My experience is anecdotal. But I don't know why you say it's a "fact". Was there surveys or anything?

I don't quite see the appeal, because Claude Code already supports something similar. They spin up container to make the changes in and then open a PR. I can just use the Claude iOS app to do this. My computer doesn't need to be running or exposed to the internet.

I've just started using Anki and I'm almost grieving. If I had had this 15 years ago I probably would have done so much better in school. I've always struggled with memorizing, but Anki has made this much easier for me. I started learning Japanese 4 months ago and I'm baffled by how much I've retained in that period. Now I'm playing with using it to learn the rules for the OneRing TTPRG.

In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions.

Funny, this is the complete opposite of my experience. Greenfield projects I've been a part of have had a ton of highly visible progress with _frequent_ updates to stakeholders basically from day 1. Same goes for complex additional features.

I love my Kindle, but I have never been able to use my iPad for reading.

I got HumbleBundle with a bunch of Pathfinder 2e PDFs cheap but I'm still tempted to buy the physical copies.

All of this is cool...but you can do them all on a laptop and you'll probably have a better time.

And those cheap/free things are only available after dropping $1000 on a new iPad