dirkc

Earlier today I found this - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11755

I've been thinking lately about different ways to get agents to do interesting things when let loose on a code base. Think mischief, not malice. Something like sneaking in a prompt/context so that all variable names are characters from a certain work of fiction. Or all debug messages must use pirate English.

Thanks, clearly my caffeine intake is at issue

I see a reference to Khan Academy, but not Go?

For small applications having an observability stack like ELK or Prometheus + Grafana tends to outweigh the application itself ito cost and complexity.

I haven't found something I'm 100% happy with to self host and tend to just go with a hosted solution. I'll give statlite a look!

I get a cloudflare 502 error for standard.site

Isn't that just saying CapEx is a bigger part of their costs as if that is a positive thing?

I did something similar, for similar reasons. In the end I just did whatever to get it published. If you show up at my door, I'll pour you your choice of beer/coffee. But I agree, it feels very invasive!

On the web side of things DNS only recently started being more private - 10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois.

Two take aways from my experience 1. I'm happy that I invested more in the web 2. The app store gives you distribution - I have a few websites with almost 0 traffic, but the app I wrote gets a handful of downloads a week almost 2 years later?

> As for me, I’ve found that the community and activity proxies are still good.

Definitely still something to look into. A project I'm checking in on from time to time is https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash/.

It will be interesting to see how the project activity is unfolds? Are people using it in production. How many errors do they find. What do those fixes entail. What happens with the docs over time. Etc.

I haven't had a change to look in depth, but based on a quick glance I'd say that the activity on the project seems like the tempo you'd expect of a similar open source project.

Keep the timer, but after 30 seconds, deduct a point, after 60 seconds show an option to reveal the word / give up.

I got curious and had a look at some of the code (>1m .rs). I was surprised to see code for a S3 client in there?

I clearly don't get the value proposition of bun? And even if I accept that you want to bundle your run time, package manager, test runner and bundler, why do you want to include things like a custom S3 client?

I like the idea, but I didn't like losing after a few words. Now it might just be me not being good at losing, but who is?

Maybe the game can always progress to the next word with your total score being reduced. So if you get all within 30 seconds you score 18/18. That way everyone can play the whole game and share with their friends how far they got:

|X|o|X|X|X|o|o|o|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|o|X| 13/18

> as we aggressively adopt AI for engineering

Why do we need to aggressively adopt things rather than thoughtfully adopt things?

It sounds like they are probably punching AI and engineers in the process

The challenge is that more and more people are producing project like this - 1,000s of commits and > 200k lines of code - and saying it was carefully created using agent based workflows and not vibe coded.

Thanks for all the info you've provided!

Maybe I'm just being a little grumpy. If I really need to look into a repository, I clone it and use vanilla git command line tools to have a look.

It's just annoying that the modern web UI from GitHub takes >1s second to load a page with 34 commits

Cloudflare seems to be an example of a company massively upping their output in the last year or so. And a lot of it seems AI driven.

I'm definitely keeping an eye on them to see if it works out for them. And if I will need to start routing around them to sleep easily at night.

How would one go about reviewing a piece of code like this?

One of the things I'd typically do is peek at the commit history. Seeing what people worked on and how they did it tends to say a lot about a project. But with LLMs generating 7101 commits in less than a month that isn't feasible. Even looking at a single day is way too much [1]. It probably also doesn't make sense since the commits content won't tell you much anyway.

ps. How do you easily get to the first commit in a repo on GitHub? Browsing commit history feels rather tedious

[1] - https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/commits/main/?since=2026-...

Wow, I'm surprised that doing an online course through coursera is still that expensive - £17,000 or $22,000 USD over 3 years!

Interestingly it does seem comparable with what it would cost through The Open University - https://www.open.ac.uk/courses/computing-it/degrees/bsc-comp...

For me the worst scenario is when a kitchen sink of non-existent functionality the customer never asked for was sold. And in all likelihood it will never be used. But some project manager is hellbent on getting it through the pipeline and checked off!

I (maybe idealistically) believe that when you give the people building agency and connect them with the end-user, you get better outcomes.

Thanks, this articulates something that I've been struggling to put a finger on. You can't review agent generated code the same way you would review a PR, someone needs to fine comb it to make sure everything is fine. And doing that for something like 100,000 lines of code over a few weeks just doesn't sound realistic to me.

I grew up with a TV like that. I'm pretty sure the one we had probably caused at least a hand full of slipped disks

Don't compromise your professional integrity by lying about how you work. Rather find a job where you don't need to lie about your use of AI if you can.

Please define "if it runs, it runs"?

Thanks for pointing out the footnote, I did not get that far. And like you say, I agree it's interesting.

The footnote however does re-enforce my concern - in what other ways do we alter our behavior when it feels like we're interacting with another human?

> So with my friend Claude I set about building

After this line all the references becomes *we*. I can't help but be a little disturbed by that

> To begin with we downloaded ... For instance we excluded ... We also selected ... We used this as a notoriety ... <and many more>

I am increasingly concerned about how LLMs are anthropomorphizing and how that affects our judgement?

I'd say some of those extra abstractions and frameworks are actually making many jobs harder.

Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro

These two bits stand out to me:

> The security researchers are not special, the insight and confidentiality are

vs

> The bottleneck now is not finding potential issues but assessing which ones are real. Unless there’s already a trust relationship, external researchers can’t meaningfully contribute

My take-away from this is that the researchers were special all along and you should probably be building a trust relationship with them.

Despite what I want to believe about tech being a meritocracy, the reality is that trust plays an extremely important role and without it we risk a collapse of our open source software ecosystem.

One of my biggest criticisms of AI is the trust vacuum within which it operates

Guess I should have stated the questions as "what makes Astro worth while to try out?" :)

My go-to for spinning up a site has been Jekyll + Bootstrap with the occasional bit of React for well over 10 years now.

While it still does the job, I'm a little curious to explore more modern options, if for nothing else to understand the choices a more junior dev would face/make today.

I'm seriously considering giving Atro a go. Is it worth it?

> This is somehow deemed acceptable by everyone involved

By some, not all. It's been crazy from the start and it is still crazy to pipe a script to bash!

This serves as a good reminder that relying on AI models is borrowing your tech from someone else. They can take it away or raise the prices arbitrarily.

If you rely on this as a core part of your business/profession, you will be at their mercy and subject to whatever whims or challenges they have.