ljm

> Pi is meant for people who know what they are doing

How many people genuinely know what they're doing when the value prop of Pi is basically to vibe code it to your taste? The entire point of vibe coding being that you don't actually have to know what you're doing?

Nothing in (AGENTS|CLAUDE).md, no Cursor style rules. Just some skills for Jira/Confluence, CI, and Playwright.

Haven't bothered doing any extra customisation in Claude Code or Codex as I don't really trust those things to apply consistently. And if you can run your CI steps locally before you push you don't need to tell an agent to remember it.

That said I've been playing with pi today and given how stripped down it is I've used it as a sandbox for customisation. Still, I haven't gone quite as far as laying down project level instructions. More that Claude Code in particular is quite heavy, and so it its prompt, and adding stuff like rich integration with GitHub and SourceHut (CI status, active branch or PR) seems comparatively trivial in pi.

Only thing left to do is switch out ghostty for the time being as it's misbehaving. Laptop hot to the touch even after idling overnight.

Needed to pay my bills. It tided me over for a short while.

Waiting for the next gig. This was before I learned that sometimes it's better to take the hit and walk away.

I've struggled with this, even encountering people who basically say "if AI can do it why do I need to spend any more time?"

It was disappointing hearing someone tank their own prospect of career growth like that.

They'll frame it as not wanting to waste anybody's time by submitting you as a candidate if you're already mid-flight on other positions, but they can still figure that out without having specifics on the actual company, role, salary, etc.

They're banking on you offering it because saying no would rule out any mysterious prospects they have to offer, but really they're looking for new leads and if it comes from a candidate then it's warmer. Just have to be polite when you give them vague info and say you're not able to share more than that.

I had a really weird power-trip interview once, and it was the CEO who was joined by a contractor who was ostensibly the technical lead for the project. There was nobody in engineering who worked full-time on the job, everybody was contracted. I was also going in as a contractor so I was aware that the interview would be a bit lighter on process as a result.

The questioning very quickly veered away from technical stuff and into stuff like, "where do you stand spiritually?" and other questions probing into whatever bizarre cosmic insights I could pull out of my ass at the time. He was the really intense kind of boss who wants to make sure you know of it with the hard back/shoulder slaps and micromanagement, and I could see his office from the boardroom which basically had an array of monitors all wired up to CCTV so he could watch (and hear) people from the comfort of his desk.

If any of that wasn't a red flag, getting hired literally 5 minutes after leaving the office was probably the biggest. I lasted about 6 months and even trying to leave was an ordeal.

It kind of is though. Someone else will say "why are you sourcing results from an Israeli company?" and another will say "why are you sourcing results from a Chinese company?" and another one yet will say "why are you sourcing results from the US?".

Why are the ethics of working with Yandex or Baidu any better or worse than the ethics of working with Google or Microsoft? Except that they're not western.

The logical answer is that a person like this wants a very strong firewall, so ethically impure bits don't cross into their LAN.

What are the challenges of doing that when so much of the internet has turned itself into SEO slop to fit Google's algorithms?

I imagine there is still a whole load of stuff out there on the internet that Google would never surface because it doesn't have enough adsense or whatever. Are you finding that?

Go is really easy to read and write, even if Go's philosophy means that some of that feels clunky because it's less featureful than other languages. It makes up for it with a comprehensive stlib that makes it trivial to build services with few to no third party dependencies.

I don't think the value prop has changed at all there. One day the AI gravy train will stop and people who used AI to punch above their weight will no longer be able to debug the stuff they built unless they put in the hard work of learning the language.

Nothing to worry about with Go in that respect because of how much it's been designed to be simple. Even the annoying err/nil checks you need to do all the time are in service of that simplicity. It gets old fast but it leaves nothing to the imagination.

We switched to 'software engineer' to encapsulate that, I think. You can receive requirements and churn out code or you can go up a level and think about the solution. Go another level up and think about the problem. Another level and it's the context of the problem. Further than that and it's the priority of it. And even higher up is how it fits in the product roadmap and the architectural decisions.

At some point you stop developing and start weighing up the requirement against your understanding of the system and the environment it works in.

npm's immaturity is arguably demonstrated by the fact it is always catching up.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but signed packages are still impractical in NPM which is why supply chain attacks still work by editing existing versions or pushing new point releases without a signature.

Or if you put all of the credentials in GitHub actions which is even more trivially exploitable through the actions marketplace because it is just git with a thin proxy, you have an even wider attack vector

The community decided it's too much effort to vet code before publishing it so here we are.

(I'm not being stupid, even ten years ago there were arguments on HN about whether you should audit your dependencies)

I landed on the 'yes, you should know what code you are getting involved with' side.

So when do we call out NPM as an easy supply chain vector and also Microsoft's ownership of NPM and their prioritisation of AI at any cost.

NPM is the windows of package managers right now.

It's entitled to what is a reasonable usage of disk space, which you generally know by the size of the installer. Some install mechanisms bypass that because they give you a minimal installer that then downloads the full package. It's not entitled to unlimited usage.

Using that same mechanism to pull in several GBs worth of extra data without any warning is sketchy. If this happened and did not respect any settings for running on a metered network then it is even worse.

Other applications where this entitlement is better understood usually have a mechanism to purge the space it uses. e.g. Docker will consume whatever space you give it but you have commands to purge that space or to limited how much it will consume if it goes through a VM.

I really don't know why anyone would try to defend a tech company on what is a table-stakes expectation for being a good actor in the ecosystem. It's really lowing the bar for the supplier's sake instead of keeping the bar high for the consumer.

As a counter point, Call of Duty (the game) was mocked for requiring a good 200+GB of disk space and the conspiracy was they did that to push other games out of your storage. The market response there is easy: don't buy COD and don't install it.

I don't think it's quite the same for a browser that abuses network effects to stay useful. In which case Chrome is to Google what IE6 was to MS. A separate topic but we know that not all browsers are considered equal on the web.

In principle I agree, but chrome has an auto-update setup and using that mechanism to download several GBs of data that is not critical to the app itself is cause for question.

Chrome is not entitled to my disk space just because I installed it and Microsoft has been excoriated for the exact same behaviour with AI.

You can also yell "hey Alexa add an open crotch G-string to my basket" and it'll be funny for the first couple of times but once it becomes a meme it's just annoying and is filtered out.

You could just as well say "Sir, this is a Wendy's. To shreds you say? Don't call me Shirley" and the model would ignore it

You do realise that writing Tangled records for issues, pulls, whatever constitutes both a spec and API.

The fact that you use a protocol to define it is beside the point. You still have to define what a Tangled record is, and the interface that accepts it, and the mechanism to resolve it on the client.

How else do you define what a 'tangled' is even if the underlying structure is git.

I would love if it coding agents didn't default to GitHub for their deep VCS integration.

If I could get the same bells and whistles by wiring up another forge, so long as it offered a decent API and/or sent events over a webhook, I'd have everything self-hosted.

The agents would need to expose an interface on their own end but as long as you implemented it with a plugin, it'd take the dependency of GitHub and you could use MCP or skills for the rest of it.

I would really just like the quirkier internet of old.

Flamewars these days are just created by shit-stirrers in another country who are just pumping out rage bait from an massive array of smartphones. It's not even an impassioned flamewar, it simply exists to aggravate.

Using AI to forcefully disengage by simply suppressing that content would be nice and also have the secondary effect of depriving various internet resources of ad revenue.

I know the 4 player version from the Yakuza games. I only knew about the solitaire version until then from a demo version on Net Yaroze on the PlayStation, where you basically got some weird games along side the demos on a new demo disc every month.

Reminds me of poker.

Also I miss the excitement of a new issue of a magazine with a demo disc of a few new games.

This basically sounds like the start of Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin.

Are we going to learn that physics no longer exists?

This is how I try to approach it. I don't think it's a new thing for a new hire to come in hot and try to figure things out themselves rather than spending time with the team. Or getting lost down rabbit holes.

I don't disagree that a practical spike is a good way to grasp a novel problem (or work with a lack of internal knowledge because it's legacy code) but there is still something to be said for attempting to work things out in the abstract too, and not necessarily by adding process, but by redeveloping that internal knowledge and getting familiar with the business domain.

In a greenfield project I will have a lot of patience for a team that doesn't grasp the problem space too well yet, and needs to feel around it by experimenting and prototyping. You have to encourage that or you might not even be building anything innovative.

For the longer term legacy project then the team can't really afford to have people going down rabbit holes and it's more beneficial to approach things in the abstract and reduce the problem as much as possible. Especially with junior or mid-level engineers who can see an old codebase as a goldmine for refactoring if left unattended.

As for the fundamental culture issue... maybe. AI increases the frequency of low quality PRs and puts a bigger burden on the reviewer. I can live with this in the short term if people take lessons from it and keep building up their own skillset. I feel this issue is not unique to my team and LLM-driven development is still novel enough that we're all figuring out the best way to tackle it.

Usually by the time a PR has been submitted it's too late to dig into aspects of the change that come from a poor understanding of the task at hand without throwing out the PR and creating rework.

So it's helpful to shift left on that and discuss how you intend to approach the solution. Especially for people who are new to the codebase or unfamiliar with the language and, thanks to AI, show little interest in learning.

Obviously not for every situation, but time can be saved by talking something through before YOLOing a bad PR.

Reactionary changes are never going to go away but the entire thrust of technological progress is "you don't need to learn."

Amusing Ourselves to Death and Superbloom both describe the same thing: methods of communiation become more efficient and education becomes more simplified, to the point of not being valued.

The nadir of which is Trump shitposting policy decisions on Twitter because he has no literacy, no intellect, and people like him because of that because he's just as uneducated as they are.

Back in the early days of the US intellect was king, it's how the US became what it was as far as I know it.

I feel for this a lot, but it's because I don't want to actually write code or build something if there is something workable already out there.

Maybe I lack imagination or curiosity, but it makes it difficult to come up with an idea and follow it through.

Security by obscurity. If another language became as ubiquitous as JS then it'd be the same.

In the context of TFA, don't rely on third party github actions that you haven't vetted. Most of them aren't needed and you can do the same with a few lines of bash. Which you can also then use locally.

The WWeWork model of being in real estate and not tech, I guess.

Given the unironic use of 'woke mind virus' by certain billionaires, there's something to be said about the sudden obsession of building data centres, no expense spared.

Tangerines (or satsumas) over Christmas were a treat in the north of England when I was a kid.

Granny Smith and Pink Lady were also considered treats when it came to apples, compared to the usual golden delicious or braeburn.