eighttrigrams

This is how I program the computer now: iteratively, working from small specs, and doing it immediately instead of keeping a backlog.

> write hilariously-verbose commit messages […] detailing not only what changed but why it changed

this can come in super-handy from time to time

> I hardly use an editor anymore, and I'm not alone. All that matters is who is signing off on the commit. In such a context I won't distinguish between me and an agent. But same, almost no editor these days.

For coding, this is more useful for heavily vibecoded projects. Thb, for my own projects most likely I will end up using it only for specs and documentation, maybe in rare cases for some tests. But, I use it for agentic memory, where I can edit the memories as well, and the agent should tend to preserve my edits when updating them.

In general, my main use case is tracking texts in knowledge management systems.

Although that would be an option (I've considered commit on every edit at one point), what I actually ended up doing is that I hook into all Bash tool calls, look if there's a git commit in there, and if so, I prepend it with the right git env variables.

I'll probably be annoyed enough soon that I want that level of granularity, too

I take care of that in two ways, 1) is via claude hooks, I make sure these are tagged as claude, 2) my sandboxed agents have git env vars set, with the same effect.

In this article I continue the more critical line of thought I began in Mindless Drones. I hate AI for what it makes us become, yet still hold that there is no point in not using it — at least for engineering, or for anything whose output can be judged to be of the same or better quality, only more of it. But never just more of it: which, sadly, is clearly the case for most non-engineering uses (and, let’s be honest, for many engineering ones as well).