@johncutlefish The more consistent one's experiences, the more one believes they understand "the real world." The more insular one's experiences, the more consistent. "Real world" is merely a descriptive term people use for the stories they tell themselves about their own experiences.

movie sound tech: "This is dialog. It's just boring story and character development, nobody cares about that" <turns volume to 2>

Model 3 and Model Y battery packs retain 85% of their capacity on average after 200K miles of driving We also offer an 8 years or 120,000 miles battery warranty, whichever comes first

Knowledge of the standard library and basic code structure would make these things 70% more useful for coding reasons. They are a little challenged without those.

Likewise with testing, it was using regexes and subprojects until I suggested using the built-in testing facilities to test directly, then it rewrote the tests less stupidly.

I said, "Wouldn't it be better to use a defaultdict instead of all the extra work, in lines N-N+12?" and it said, "Oh, yes, a brilliant idea", and used not only defaultdict as it should, but also used Counter where it was appropriate elsewhere. That was a sneaky regeneration.

You’re hearing from God more than you think! Listen to these incredible stories of how He speaks.

Hmmm... if you program with an LLM, the odd are pretty good that the code it was trained on made rather poor use of standard libraries -- it's likely to recreate language features and library functions inline in long functions. That seems inefficient to run.

"Programming in English" is not the end-all dream and the perfect end state. Creating programs that really work as well and quickly as we can is the goal.

This is not gatekeeping: the languages should be fluently learnable by newbs for expressing programming ideas, and maybe they can even be paired with tools to help new people learn

No, they don't have to be textual. No, the problem isn't that they're not English-like enough. No, it wouldn't be better to program in English.

it shouldn't seem remotely like a hot take: Programming languages are designed to express programming ideas. It's what they're for, and the ones who express a set of algorithms best are the best language to express those algorithms in.

i will also tidy up code. When people decide that they can make a mess and I'll come clean it up, I know what I'm working with and we can start to address that.

Am I a cleanliness consultant? No. I've been in software for over 40 years and know my way around coding practice and languages. I can teach and coach and give advice. It's good to know who you're working with.

i make it a habit, when consulting, to make coffee when the coffee pot is low, and to clean up the coffee area. If people treat me as the cleaning person, it tells me a lot about them. I will tidy messes, I will clean whiteboards, I will straighten messy cables.

The LLM CLI tool i've been using is pretty effective at writing code, but if you ask it questions about approach, it burns hundreds of credits. Adding pages to a dash app? Cheap. Asking about how to represent the date range chooser? EXPENSIVE. Don't ask the coder!

I didn't mean Xitter, but 'whatever process or technique is the topic of discussion' - often git branching, use of ticket systems, style of work, way of reviewing, etc.

If it doesn't make a difference, then personal preference is as good a decision-making criterion as any. If it matters, personal preference is one of the least valuable criteria.

Never anthropomorphise inanimate objects; they hate that.

I would assume that you know this: rewriting is NOT refactoring. Don't be confused. Also, regenerating with an AI isn't refactoring.

Why do we do X? Well, it is no worse than any of the other awful ways we could do it…. Don’t dismiss that as pure sarcasm. There is something valuable about working in a way that doesn’t suck exceptionally, especially when alternatives are few.

Have you been using a prompt/context file like this? https://t.co/BIH6Wl2SeK

Odd that I question an LLM's technique and, as it does, it says "this was a bad choice, it would be better to do it your way." And then doesn't. Also, it generates some code and I ask it if it followed the rules set for it, and it says "no." Okay, fix that - and it mostly does.