wellpast

Two months ago I had a water pipe burst in my house.

Now I am in the claims process with the large insurance co., using Claude to basically run my side of the claim — reading the policy, organizing and filing the ALE receipt scans, reading and notifying me of messages from the agents, calling out when they are delaying too much or not fulfilling their promises, challenging their decisions on what to cover based on the policy, keeping a log of all of our correspondences, logging work estimates and invoices, I cant imagine doing all this tedious work myself—w/o Claude I’d probably just rollover fatigued.

Does my adjuster like this? On the one hand, I’m giving her incredibly tidy and documented receipts and logs, which I am sure is saving her time.

On the other hand, Claude is calling out her BS and delays, which have been atrocious—so much so that Claude is now adamant that she has gone too far and that I should be filing a complaint with the state insurance bureau.

Definitely the hallmark of junior. Obsession with code deduplication as the highest pri when it’s quite low among others.

> that can't hold invariants in their head across thousands or millions of lines of code and possibly an exponential number of interactions.

There’s your problem. And static typing won’t save you either.

The skill is not that, it’s the ability to compose and evolve systems such that you don’t have to hold so much state in your head.

(Btw that property can hold for a million LOC codebase.)

“Until you get better” at pedaling, training wheels can help.

It’s not an arrogant take; it’s arrogant to think you know static typing is a requirement for developing software well.

Simply put, even solipsism is unfalsifiable.

Not even to optimize for, but to write correct programs you really need to understand the runtime which is usually broader than the syntax.

All Clojure (lisps) do is remove the stupidity of syntax.

Even if syntax is the minor thing, why wear a stupid, uncomfortable shirt while running when you could wear one so comfortable you scarcely feel it?

I’m willing to be wrong but this industry-wide emphasis on AI creative/coding workflows seems way over-engineered.

Ime successful creative execution looks like micro-iterations where each output informs the next creative move.

I can build something incredibly fast from essentially caveman grunt instructions through an LLM harness, iterating as I go.

Optimizing for feeding a huge plan to an agent sounds to me like a net waste of time. And looking over the shoulder of industry peers trying to do this, I don’t see their outputs or throughput some remarkable improvement over what I can produce with minimal fanfare usage.

> When I think about a programming problem, I think in terms of the sequence of instructions I need the computer to do, and the memory locations that can hold the information the computer needs to track.

You’re almost there. Just stop thinking about the sequence of instructions. Focus on the information half (the values) that you need to produce.

In Austin we have most notably Terra Toys and Toy Joy.

Terra Toys is 50 years old, its space shows it. Hand-written recommendations and prices. The employees demonstrate and play with the toys, welcome you genuinely as you enter. The toys seem curated for actual fun not schtick. I went in last week and it was popping. It’s an experience.

Does Main Street need to focus on experience to survive? If so, how does it monetize experience if selling items isn’t the first focus now?

> HTML is marking up the meaning of the document.

Is this true at all anymore, except for SEO optimized sites/content?

For apps, it’s all layout, isn’t it — and HTML, JS, CSS have all evolved heavily to support UI-first, haven’t they?

One way to potentially discourage or curb AI-edited/written is integrate AI into HN so that your submissions get recommendations based on HN post guidelines such as “consider tone”, “substance” etc.

Then less motivation to jump out to external LLM to even get comments on your content which can temptingly lead to editing/generation.

Being able to solve problems with true simplicity is a master’s skill. The skill to recognize simplicity and its value is a skill as well.

You can try to explain this OP’s concept to a stakeholder in a 1000 different sensible ways and you’ll get blinking deer-in-headlight eyes back at you.

This skill is hard-earned and, so, rare.

Therefore, many hierarchies are built on sufficient mediocrity top to bottom.

Which works because bottom line doesn’t often matter in software dev anyway.

And even when it does matter it’s multiplicatively rare to have a hierarchy or even the market that it tries to serve who can build, comprehend, handle high power::complexity systems, products, tools.