code_martial

I found that out in the context of imperative-style language development. I wanted the IR to be as commands with structs and it took some effort to steer it away from Lisp.

Not answering your question directly, but FWIW, that’s the default IR notation Claude reaches for.

Having just finished rewriting a 20-pager that went from outline -> slop -> finished product, I can say with certainty that it’s not a case of AI being too intelligent.

It could be a case of AI being differently intelligent, though. Here are some of the patterns I encountered:

Repetition: AI never breaks a sweat repeating the same thing over and over. This is fine with code because there are more tools to catch and eliminate it and even so, it matters less as long as the code works.

Jumbled statement order: AI has a glossary of facts and it is not very careful about the order of… shall I say, revelation… of facts. We have a certain way of building understanding in deductive steps. AI writing disregards that. (Aside: I actually started using an Answer Set Programming tool to keep the LLM on track.)

Mixing attribution and control: we have a sense of what things are passive, what are active, what controls and what follows or reacts in a situation. AI mixes it up badly and suddenly you have stuff like “the lead shade is red but it has nothing to show for its presence around orange” instead of saying that the red accent doesn’t contrast well against orange.

Post-training flavours: I think this is clear from how Claude models write vs. other trainers’. Even accounting for intelligence differences, Claude has an empirically worse writing style.

I believe “everyone” is just the LLMs and meat proxies. I don’t know anyone personally who ever recommended the Saga pattern.

Having forward progression with staged and committed states (or any other intermediate states required) is more tractable.

> This saved time I would otherwise have spent debating with coworkers. But it’s not always right and it is easily led astray (and will lead astray), so you need a clear idea in mind, a firm hand, and good judgment.

The “will lead astray” part is concerning. If you already have a clear idea in mind, you probably don’t need to have the debate with coworkers.

If you are having a debate with coworkers or AI, you would rather that they be knowledgeable enough to not lead you astray.

In cases where I don’t have a clear understanding of some area, yet I don’t have someone knowledgeable to talk to, I have found myself having to discuss the same point with multiple LLMs from multiple angles to tease out the probable right way.

In summary: obviate experts, receive correct guidance, save time —- pick any two.

`EDITOR=mg` is a great find. I never knew of it before! One caveat I found is that it doesn’t support unicode (at least not in the default mac installation).

You can preallocate your data structures and control memory layout in Go.

Also, despite GC there’s a sizeable amount of systems programming already done in Go and proven in production.

Given how much importance is being deservedly given to memory safety, Go should be a top candidate as a memory safe language that is also easier to be productive with.

It looks like there’s Canada to cross before reaching the US. Am I missing something?

I’m not sure. I keep asking the LLMs whether I should rewrite project X in language Y and it just asks back, “what’s your problem?” And most of the times it shoots my problems down showing exactly why rewriting won’t fix that particular problem. Heck, it even quoted Joel Spolsky once!

Of course, I could just _tell_ it to rewrite, but that’s different.

I just asked Claude to create a memory system for itself for one of my projects. It created a file based utility written in Rust on its own. I offered it to use beads but it declined as beads is a task tracker and what we needed was a spec tracker.

Long winded way to say that it’s now easier to just create something to fit your needs… like 3D printing components.

Claude Code already has a built-in task tracker for short/mid term tracking.

No, that’s not what I said.

It’s a worthwhile answer if it can be proven correct because it means that we’ve found a way to create intelligence, even if that way is not very efficient. It’s still one step better than not knowing how to do so.

Reminds me of a 10 letter Greek word that starts with a k.