musesum

What I hope to do with refactoring is to distill namespace and common patterns into a DSL. I am very curious about what tradeoffs you found.

Am waiting for the next Mac Studio to come out to experiment with the "AI for everything" approach. Most likely, the open source distilled models will lower quality. So, another "price vs quality" tradeoff. Still, will be fun to code like I'm at a foundation lab.

Good idea. Am still a bit shy around token budget spend.

I wrote something similar in a Claude Code instructions.md: "minimize cyclomatic complexity" What happened next? It generated an 8 line wrapper function called only once from a different file. So, I told it to inline that logic in the caller. The result? One. Line. Of. Code.

So, I asked it to modify its instructions.md file to not repeat that mistake. The result was the new line "Avoid single-use wrapper functions; inline logic at the call site unless reused"

instructions.md is the new intern.

I wrote something similar in a Claude Code instructions.md: "minimize cyclomatic complexity" What happened next? It generated an 8 line wrapper function called only once from a different file. So, I told it to inline that logic in the caller. The result? One. Line. Of. Code.

So, I asked it to modify its instructions.md file to not repeat that mistake. The result was the new line "Avoid single-use wrapper functions; inline logic at the call site unless reused"

instruction.md is the new intern.

I wonder. I follow @DamiLeeArch on YouTube. She talks about architecture in the built environment. Ostensibly, built for Humans. At least for now.

Has California Law changed, since 2015?

My company was acquired by another company that had in-house lawyers. California Law states that you have rights to your own IP, when produced on your hardware and on your own time. So, I was careful to air gap all my work on a separate computer. Meanwhile, the acquiring company ask me to sign an employment agreement. Its terms restated the California law in very ambiguous terms. I couldn't tell if I was declaring rights to my own IP or signing away my rights. So, I asked them: "which is it?" Their replay was "Yes." ... I was an employee for a day.

Long ago, a proud moment for me was writing -20K lines of code in a month.

A few years ago, I tried that again with a remote team of 20 coders. I failed; I couldn't keep up with the barrage of pull requests.

Today, pair programming with Claude Code and GPT feels more like the later.

I think there is an opportunity here for smart refactoring. But, needs a larger context. I tried this on some legacy code with Cursor and Claude opus 4.1, but a million tokens is not enough. I dunno; maybe translate between a private and shared LLM. Has anyone tried this?

So, aside from trust the biggest barrier is lack of adaptability?

My chain of thought:

1) Aaron Marcus - who found optimal menu count to be 5 +/- 2

2) Magic number 7 +/- 2

3) Fitt's Law selectivity (bigger is easier)

4) Shared layout for mobile + desktop

5) I hate short form

6) Is 5) a non-sequitur?

7) No! I now have the attention span of a goldfish.

8) Maybe I should read a book

Personal context is tacit experience. Cultural context is aggregate.

Wittgenstein stated that the differences between personal and cultural language makes it impossible to agree on anything foundational to philosophy.

Godel did something similar to discrete structures by hacking self reference -- a kind of recursive self reference with no exit state.

I think pair programming with an LLM is interesting. You get to compare personal context with aggregate context. Plus, the external feedback helps me break out of excessive personal self reference.