aaaronic

It's the difference between constantly reviewing someone else's code and getting to write the code yourself.

There's both deep satisfaction and deep value in having an understanding of the past, present, and notional future of the system (especially at scale). If I use agentic tools to do the actual coding, I never feel like I have as deep an understanding of the implementation, it's inherent assumptions or lessons learned. Over time, my understanding of the system atrophies badly enough that it becomes difficult to steer the LLM, instead of the other way around.

This is what makes those "unicorn"/great managers who both manage well AND maintain a clear understanding of the system over time so amazing.

That feature is definitely part of why it's still so relevant. The hstore approach wasn't nearly enough when it was all PG offered.

Sure, best not to overcomplicate early if you don't need it.

PG is great and I work with it daily, but it's also not a problem to think about scale early and at least have a notional plan for what to and how to know when scale is becoming an issue in your system as you're designing it. Even PG is overkill and sqlite is more than enough for some of my projects.

There are a lot of specialized tools available, but you definitely don't need to put every one in your toolbox. Experience and observation help you make those edits -- and of course there's almost always room for improvement, but "good enough" definitely exists (until it doesn't anymore :D).

Do you think it's actively deciding to remove them or just not noticing you added them and then overwriting?

I ask because when I started informing it I made personal edits, it stopped doing this kind of thing so often and let me work _with_ it more.

My saved prompt now says never to assume a file has not been edited since the last time it was read between prompts.

My "favorite" Claudism is when I critique its work and ask it to remove some unnecessary part of the design -- and then the diff has more green than red because it added comments about why the code is no longer there -- the code that was never in the mainline and never asked for!

Most of the older consoles don't have an FPU. Fixed point is king on those older systems.

Yes and no. It depends which branch of chemistry you world have chosen to go down. Physical Chemistry certainly improves a fair amount of the hand waving, but even there the underlying physics is simplified fairly often (as I understand it — I went straight Physics and dabbled in Chemistry from the other side).

Sigma and Pi bonds are typically covered in AP Chemistry, even if the “why/how” is hand waved pretty heavily. The valence cloud shapes get wild for heavier atoms and bonds between two or more atoms add even more to the mix.

It's not like they're mutually exclusive. In fact, multiple candidates seem to be quite sympathetic in their feedback loops.

I thought his name was Watson (the dog assistant).

Edit: I was wrong. But there is "Power Pup" and apparently Will Shakespeare

Ha, I have a 16 year old who yells "chat" often enough when online gaming to be familiar with that use.

I'm positive these students did use an LLM to get the help instead of crowdsourcing, but it is an interesting linguistic overlap.

And while I'm on my "old man" soapbox -- "look it up" and "search for it" somehow became "search it up" with the young people. I corrected my son for years before I started hearing college students also saying it that way...

I was hoping to get them access to a specific tool like GitHub Copilot via GitHub Education, but when I looked, sign-ups were paused, so I went the tool-agnostic approach. Even during installation a lot of them were telling me how "chat" told them to fix their installation issues (but some were clearly using an alternative to ChatGPT, specifically).

However, I see from other comments on this post that I may need to include a CLAUDE.md as a copy (and could maybe just leave the .history part out of that version?).

I told them up front this was new territory and we're all learning from it. If they're overusing it I assured them they won't be dealing with a student integrity issue, but I will be giving them feedback if they're clearly over-reliant and if they continue to do so, it could eventually impact the grade on later assignments.

I'm hoping they learn to use it as a tool instead of trying to offload all cognition to it.

This is a CS course targeted at non-majors, so thankfully the "fundamentals" aren't as critical as the overall themes and general skills.

I'm trying something similar this semester with my course via AGENTS.md. I think this one is overly verbose and probably falls out of context windows pretty quickly, based on my experience (for me, a very terse but clear set of 30 lines performed better than providing examples and more nuanced explanations during my testing with a few models).

I have included the basic "I am a student -- help me learn, don't just do everything for me," but I also am trying out telling it to generate a .history folder with a markdown history of every prompt and a summary of the action take in response.

I _know_ there are some tools that offer the prompt history automatically, but I've told students they can use _whatever_ tool they want, but should let me know if the folder isn't showing up as they work.

The .history folder is required if they used AI and I intend to review it and try to give specific feedback to the students using it as too much of a crutch.

I just started this last Friday, so wish me luck!

Brave man. RIP your inbox.