Pretty fun, took me about 10 minutes but found 24 words 10 of them bonus. This was #5 for future viewers.
Edit: welp, spent another 15 mins and managed to solve the previous 4. Currently whipping up a custom version for myself that gives a new set of words related to a theme on each solve, love it.
When I learnt programming I had a big dusty Perl book, I didn't even have a computer. A mix of library books and using my savings to print out c++ tutorials etc was the thing. Then came forums, then came youtube (matrix soundtrack and notepad), then stackoverflow etc.
If I had access to even the weakest offline model now as I did back then where it can save me hours of trial and error, docs sifting and getting my questions closed I'd be a different man.
I love using Claude to one shot interactive tutorials, so far I've done voxels, shadow mapping, sdfs for font rendering, a weird dialect of asm and much more. I see it as the perfect assistant to mentor someone nowadays, if you have actual passion for the field it's hard to go wrong.
I had the exact same experience, on Windows had to purge everything and lost all my history, on Mac it was a one click upgrade and sign in again for the most part with history gone as well.
Overall the experience was pretty bad for what is expected from them and I'm wondering what the thought process behind this is, I dislike this single prompt box review workflow and is a reason I don't use any of the tui stuff and it's odd that they are leaning so hard to mimic CC when others like cursor are embracing the same workflow but still sculpting around the code. I want to edit as I'm working and have access to all my normal tools and fragmenting my work to this new vision and a separate text editor defeats the point.
For now I'll probably switch to using it as a fallback when I've exhausted my quota elsewhere and start to rely on it less before the next rug pull when I wake up and the IDE is gone. Aside, Gemini has been surprisingly good and I really liked their take on the implementation and review workflow.
Here's what I did that worked for last two teams I managed. We used slack as a hub for everything, we had some brittle [1] services so there were cron scripts that ran every minute and would alert to slack when it was down @ing someone. Likewise rolled own dumb logger that just simply existed as a middleware initially to capture requests and responses and certain events were logged to slack and disk in the code with `event(enum, json)`. This slack bot could also dump certain info for users or events with some slash commands provided you had an id. From these logs and other bits added over time could see when execs connected or someone had difficulty with auth, a job or method took abnormally long and current active sessions etc. This grew to support ceo, marketing and other devs and got pretty involved at some point we had small services tied in that could visualize geojson over a map for a trip completed, dump a replay session or get all stacktraces for the day. Also for 3rd party services we couldn't tie into directly used a proxy setup where we didn't call it directly but inside a wrapper where we could capture data so a call to `api.somesite.com/v1/events` became `mysite.com/proxy?site=api.somesite.com/v1/events` in our apps so when our clients called this we knew and could again log.
Since this seems close enough to the similar problem I had you could take a look at this approach and start with what's being requested or the repeating problems and have a central hub for others ingest these via discord or slack and appropriate channels #3rd-party-uptimes, #backups, #raw-logs, #events. From this we rarely used our dashboards, bugsnag or had the need to ssh into any server to pull access or error logs.
- [1] This one was particularly so because they had a org policy to randomly reset vpn passwords and the only way to change it was using a desktop client to basically set the same password again.
> The core technical challenge, as you can imagine, came from trying to do something that Apple otherwise does not allow
I think the main question most would ask is what affordances can you give or details you can share to prove that this will continue working in future versions of the os since the foundations seem brittle.
I use Wallpaper Engine on windows for one purpose mostly to avoid burn in since my monitors are always on but I've grown to like it over the years and would like to try something on mac but would hate to purchase software that stops working or future update comes with a readme of how to "re-enable" it.
I love using AI to prototype that something is possible then go and build it myself while borrowing bits from that initial MVP. The other night I wanted to build a browser extension that could intercept requests from a tab, claude got me something working in about 10 minutes with a couple prompts and a local storage session and then I toyed with the UI a bit to see what was possible.
Now after a weekend morning I have something much slimmer, predictable and sophisticated running... my extension shows a list of repeated responses and I can toggle which one to send to a localhost api that has a simple job queue to update a sqlite db with each new entry, extract the important parts and send it to my lm studio gpt oss 20b endpoint for some analysis and finally and send me a summary on telegram.
I know what I want in my head but cutting down the experimenting or PoC step down to minutes vs hours is pretty useful and as a competent enough dev it's elevated what I can get done now so I can take on more work than I would have by myself previously.
From Ton Roosendaal (Blender) on a GSoC mailing list [1] some years ago that stuck with me and I always tell new hires or interns when they make mention of not having anything to show.
Something I also have to remind myself of every now and then when I spend days or weeks researching a topic without anything user facing to show during that time.
> You cannot spend time on something without having done something. Progress is not a requirement. If you spend time on learning something, report on what you learned, If you read a book, write a short summary of it. If you make demo files to test things, show the demo files and report on the tests.
I've found many useful threads and answers for some super niche and obfuscated stuff on Gitter where you get some discord like benefits (better irc) and is indexed by engines. I liked their model where you can have rooms for topics, repos etc but shame it's hardly used.
Edit: welp, spent another 15 mins and managed to solve the previous 4. Currently whipping up a custom version for myself that gives a new set of words related to a theme on each solve, love it.