Recent submissions

Comment · 5 months ago
But the correct way to do it is to have a separate account with more privileges, and only give AI access to your standard developer account
Comment · 6 months ago
Exactly one year on from Oniguruma's archival on GitHub and fancy-regex is in a pretty good position to act as a compatible, memory-safe alternative.

Since the previous release, fancy-regex now has support for subroutine calls - although relative recursion level backreferences are still currently unsupported.

There also a PR with an experimental optimization, which may get released soon.

Comment · 6 months ago
Bat has an option to use a built-in pager, a Rust crate called minus
Comment · 8 months ago
This resonates with me for a couple of reasons. One is that despite a good AGENTS.md file and a detailed, specific prompt, I've seen LLM agents generate all sorts of questionable code. From making a mistake, running tests and fixing the mistake meanwhile adding a comment which only makes sense when you read it from the perspective of having seen it make that mistake... As soon as anyone else would read it, there is no context and it can be confusing or misleading...

Or naming tests only considering the specific task at hand, which is meaningless when compared to the grand scheme of things.

Yesterday I had GitHub ask me to complete a survey on it's Copilot coding agent, and it made me realize that some obvious things were missing from my AGENTS.md. Notes that are unnecessary to be written "normally" because it aligns naturally with how human programmers work. When writing a new unit test in a file full of unit tests, I typically copy an existing test which has roughly what I need, paste it and adapt it. Or at least look at existing tests when building a new one. I've seen LLM agents ignore private helper methods and do full integration style tests for new test cases because they don't work like that unless specifically instructed...

So yes, I definitely feel that AI can increase tech debt big time unless managed carefully - paved roads are the way to go for human developers and AI agents. It does get tricky when you need to branch out and do something new or never considered before though...

Comment · 10 months ago
I personally really enjoyed this article - thanks for sharing.

I have worked for companies which use OKRs to help decide what they want to achieve, but it was never clear to me how they decide what features to implement to reach those goals.

Seeing the "impact, confidence, and ease scores (ICE)" concept and how it should be done is quite an eye opener for me. Maybe that has been done where I work, just never shared with me - a lowly senior developer, who knows...

Comment · 11 months ago
Specifications are there for a reason... Why use Bluetooth at all if they don't actually use it properly?
Comment · 11 months ago
I tried using Mergiraf a year or so ago, and ended up with so many weird problems that I eventually tracked down to being caused by it, that I disabled and uninstalled it and never looked back - it was more hassle than it was worth
Comment · 1 year ago
Having to pipe to a pager - to follow the unix philosophy - means: - extra typing each time - the pager receives static output. There is no interactivity... Sure, most pagers can search. But there is no way to have a table with adjustable columns, or toggle word wrap or line numbers etc.

I feel that for a tool like bat, it is better to have it built-in and not follow the composable philosophy because it is just so much more convenient. Of course the minus integration in bat is fairly basic at the moment, I guess supporting different code paths for static pagers vs interactive would increase maintenance burden quite a lot...

Comment · 1 year ago
Maybe create a shell alias which would act as a wrapper around git to do just that, when you try to commit on the wrong branch
Comment · 1 year ago
git itself has no concept of branch policies, it is purely a server side thing. But surely it doesn't really matter what branch you commit to locally, if you can't push it, you haven't done any damage and can just create a new branch and push that instead?
Comment · 1 year ago
Isn't that what branch policies are for? It can get annoying when making a release (from a local machine as opposed to automatically in CI/CD pipelines), but in other circumstances it serves the purpose very well in my experience

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