rgoulter

5 ms·

1.
by rgoulter 5d ago
I think the main insight from "functional core, imperative shell" is more about structuring the code so as to be easy to test. Without that structure, code tends to be difficult to test, since the impure stuff like network request
2.
by rgoulter 6d ago
Yes. I think if you're on a team that cares about quality, LLMs can help you write quality code faster. If you're on a team that's mindful about technical debt, you can have make practical trade-offs for velocity now at the e
3.
by rgoulter 6d ago
LLMs are not magical tools which take slop as input, and produce well thought out documentation and tests and code as a result. Over the last year, LLM coding agents gotten pretty good. It's no longer "if your results suck, you go
4.
by rgoulter 6d ago
Without LLMs, you can still have bad development processes which lead to increasing technical debt with no plan for paying it off. LLMs let you move faster. But it's not as if introducing them is the only reason your codebase isn'
5.
by rgoulter 6d ago
> Unit tests at >95% coverage Eh. I wouldn't focus on unit test coverage. I think it's true that good, well tested code will have higher code coverage than crappy code. But, above a certain point (which will vary from codeba
6.
by rgoulter 7d ago
> Sure, there is still use for language expertise, but not enough to get excited over new concepts and ideas. Programming and learning new things can still be fun in the era of agentic coding. With LLMs, I get to quicky ask: what would t
7.
by rgoulter 7d ago
The punch and profound-sounding phrasing is also Claude; but pre-LLM it might make sense for a marketing page. "Your laptop stays private. The URL goes everywhere." A URL ... goes , does it? I've seen it pointed out (&
8.
by rgoulter 9d ago
> Now, if you can steer an LLM reasonably well, you can quickly build an MVP that goes well beyond your own understanding of the implementation. Pre-LLM, I'd distinguish between e.g. "I know Python" and "I know this c
9.
by rgoulter 12d ago
Can you help provide examples from your development experience where "knowing the accurate history of what happened" was a very big advantage, to the extent where not having this knowledge would have made things very difficult?
10.
by rgoulter 13d ago
This prioritises accuracy/history of what happened, but this has significant disadvantages and practically no advantages (other than "accuracy of what happened". There are cases where you really do want an append-only leger,
11.
by rgoulter 14d ago
> I wonder what use case there would be to checkout the same branch in multiple worktrees. I've run into it when I've wanted to checkout that branch (to try running code there, or view a file, or rebase it, or whatever) and the
12.
by rgoulter 14d ago
The linked post is not that long. The readme in the linked project happens to be longer, but it's clearly because the author put tables of keymap bindings in the readme. It's what I'd hope a well-written readme should look li
13.
by rgoulter 18d ago
I can tell you wrote this comment when you were younger.
14.
by rgoulter 21d ago
For one, there are frequently examples posted to HN where LLM coding agents have been used to help people complete projects which otherwise wouldn't have been done. You're taking a really strict view of 'meaningful' if
15.
by rgoulter 1mo ago
This whole post reads like a frustration with a lack of thought. I think it's worth distinguishing 'LLM assistance' based on how much thought/effort went into the prompt. e.g. It's popular to hate on "my collea
16.
by rgoulter 1mo ago
Interesting discussion of a chorded input device alongside modal editing of code. Modal editing is quite prominent in vim and vim-flavoured tools. So, I don't think model editing's lack of popularity is due to people not knowing a
17.
by rgoulter 1mo ago
I'd count in LLM coding agents favour: e.g. willingness and capability to do things which I'd have to go read a tutorial for; as well as rapidly being able to iterate and narrow down e.g. when given access to a repl. Rhombus looks
18.
by rgoulter 2mo ago
Each to their own, but I think free weights is the easiest activity where you get to feel tangible progress from doing it. You move weight around, later you move the same around a bit more (yay!), or move a heavier weigh around (yay!). You
19.
by rgoulter 2mo ago
Nix (& NixOS) are very much in the same "as code" as Terraform. -- You put in extra effort now, to save effort later. This isn't traditionally 'practical'. It's quicker to just install the package, compared
20.
by rgoulter 2mo ago
Hmm. Using e.g. Claude code: I could see this as next step: "plain text editor" progresess to "with autocomplete"; using an LLM coding agent is then an abstraction over editing code. Using e.g. LLM-based system: natural
21.
by rgoulter 2mo ago
A naive hope is: you see that the LLM is so good at coding that all you need to do is supply a "yes/no" on what you want. Turns out that understanding the technical domain is important to getting good results, even if the LLM
22.
by rgoulter 2mo ago
To an extent, but not to that extent. There's a significant difference between (say) 20wpm and 100wpm. -- Your comment is 150-200 words; so that's the difference between spending two or three minutes vs ten (just typing it out,
23.
by rgoulter 2mo ago
'Maybe cheap but not free' is a good observation. If I'm getting paid for the work, I'm happy to leverage the LLMs so I can do more. If I'm paying for the work, I expect more from it. For hobbyist stuff, where I&#x2
24.
by rgoulter 3mo ago
> I think the last time I tried was a year ago though, so I assume it has improved. I noticed that coding agents seemed to get pretty good around 2025 Oct/Nov. If it's improved? My experience with Nickel-lang (probably as not-i
25.
by rgoulter 3mo ago
Another consideration: written by hand, the trade-off of development velocity vs well organised code means that it can be worth taking some tech debt now in order to deliver some value now. (Especially when prototyping etc.). With coding ag
26.
by rgoulter 3mo ago
Kindof. The problem is: quickly fixing problems (or preventing problems) benefits from having a good understanding of what the code is doing. If you do have a suite of automated checks that's comprehensive enough that if it passes, no
27.
by rgoulter 3mo ago
devenv is really nice. devenv brings modularity to development shells. For example, you could configure your devenv module for the shell you want (which env vars you want set, which packages you want available, etc.), and then re-use this
28.
by rgoulter 3mo ago
> Also, NixOS is not very flexible. I prefer e. g. /Programs/Ruby/4.0.5/ I'd characterise it as the opposite: A unique aspect of NixOS is that it avoids global state as much as possible (& prefers to symlink
29.
by rgoulter 3mo ago
> I suppose you're saying ASCII 10 was chosen as newly because it aligns with the down arrow on keyboards of the time. Maybe. The linked StackExchange has it as: > What character was used for what control code was mostly a matter
30.
by rgoulter 3mo ago
> \n is ^J (ctrl-J) so there's some logic there The same 'j' as vi uses for 'hjkl'. https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/42426/why-did-vi-use-...

More ›