A year of vibes(lucumr.pocoo.org)
lucumr.pocoo.org
A year of vibes
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a-year-of-vibes/
127 comments
When I find myself in a situation where I’ve been hammering an LLM and it keeps veering down unproductive paths - trying poor solutions or applying fixes that make no difference but eventually we do arrive at the correct answer, the result is often a massive 100+ KB running context.
To help mitigate this in the future I'll often prompt:
To help mitigate this in the future I'll often prompt:
“Why did it take so long to arrive at the solution? What did you do wrong?”
“In a single paragraph, describe the category of problem and a recommended approach for diagnosing and solving it in the future.”
- When resolving challenging directives, refresh yourself with: docs/DISCOVERIES.md - it contains useful lessons learned and discoveries made during development.
Yep - this has worked well for me too. I do it a little differently:
I have a /review-sessions command & a "parse-sessions" skill that tells Claude how to parse the session logs from ~/.claude/projects/, then it classifies the issues and proposes new skills, changes to CLAUDE.md, etc. based on what common issues it saw.
I've tried something similar to DISCOVERIES.md (a structured "knowledge base" of assumptions that were proven wrong, things that were tried, etc.) but haven't had luck keeping this from getting filled with obvious things (that the code itself describes) or slightly-incorrect things, or just too large in general.
I have a /review-sessions command & a "parse-sessions" skill that tells Claude how to parse the session logs from ~/.claude/projects/, then it classifies the issues and proposes new skills, changes to CLAUDE.md, etc. based on what common issues it saw.
I've tried something similar to DISCOVERIES.md (a structured "knowledge base" of assumptions that were proven wrong, things that were tried, etc.) but haven't had luck keeping this from getting filled with obvious things (that the code itself describes) or slightly-incorrect things, or just too large in general.
100%. I like the idea of turning it into a SKILL.
I do have to perform more manual adjustments/consolidation to the final postmortem before placing it in the discoveries md file, because as you pointed out LLMs tend to be exceptionally verbose.
I do have to perform more manual adjustments/consolidation to the final postmortem before placing it in the discoveries md file, because as you pointed out LLMs tend to be exceptionally verbose.
When you get stuck in a loop it's best to remove all code back to a point it didn't have problems. If you continue debugging in that hammering failure loop you get TONS of random future bugs.
I've had good luck doing something like this first (but more specific to the issue at hand):
We are getting stuck in an unproductive loop. I am going to discard all of this work and start over from scratch. Write a prompt for a new coding assistant to accomplish this task, noting what pitfalls to avoid.
We are getting stuck in an unproductive loop. I am going to discard all of this work and start over from scratch. Write a prompt for a new coding assistant to accomplish this task, noting what pitfalls to avoid.
Over time, do you think this process could lock you into an inflexible state?
I'm reminded of the trade off between automation and manual work. Automation crystalizes process, and thus the system as a whole loses it's ability to adapt in a dynamic environment.
I'm reminded of the trade off between automation and manual work. Automation crystalizes process, and thus the system as a whole loses it's ability to adapt in a dynamic environment.
Nothing about this feels inflexible to me at the moment - I'm evolving the way I use these tools on a daily basis, constantly discovering new tricks that work.
Just this morning I found out that I can tell Claude Code how to use my shot-scraper CLI tool to debug JavaScript and it will start doing exactly that:
Just this morning I found out that I can tell Claude Code how to use my shot-scraper CLI tool to debug JavaScript and it will start doing exactly that:
you can run javascript against the page using:
shot-scraper javascript /tmp/output.html \
'document.body.innerHTML.slice(0, 100)'
- try that
We don't need automation for that, we "achieve" that through our processes already. Specifically, software creation processes of large teams with many changing developers over long periods. Example (but they are not the only one): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 -- changing or adding anything becomes increasingly burdensome.
I would like to post that every time somebody warns of the dangers of AI for maintainability. We are long past that point, long before AI. Businesses made the conscious decision that it is okay for quality to deteriorate, they'll squeeze profits from it for as long as possible and then they assume something new has already come along anyway. The few business still relying in that technical-debt-heavy product are still offered service, for large fees.
AI is just more of the same. When it becomes too hard to maintain they'll just create a new software product. Pretty much like other things in the material world work too, e.g. housing, or gadgets, or fashion. AI actually supports this even more, if new software can be created faster than old code can be maintained that's quite alright for the money-making oriented people. It is harder to sell maintenance than something new at least once every decade anyway.
I would like to post that every time somebody warns of the dangers of AI for maintainability. We are long past that point, long before AI. Businesses made the conscious decision that it is okay for quality to deteriorate, they'll squeeze profits from it for as long as possible and then they assume something new has already come along anyway. The few business still relying in that technical-debt-heavy product are still offered service, for large fees.
AI is just more of the same. When it becomes too hard to maintain they'll just create a new software product. Pretty much like other things in the material world work too, e.g. housing, or gadgets, or fashion. AI actually supports this even more, if new software can be created faster than old code can be maintained that's quite alright for the money-making oriented people. It is harder to sell maintenance than something new at least once every decade anyway.
You can export all agent traces to otel, either directly or via output logging. Then just dump it in clickhouse with metadata such as repo, git user, cwd, etc.
You can do evals and give agents long term memory with the exact same infrastructure a lot of people already have to manage ops. No need to retool, just use what's available properly.
You can do evals and give agents long term memory with the exact same infrastructure a lot of people already have to manage ops. No need to retool, just use what's available properly.
With great love to your comment, this has the same vibes as the infamous 2007 Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I'd also argue that the context for an agent message is not the commit/release for the codebase on which it was run, but often a commit/release that is yet to be set up. So there's a bit of apples-to-oranges in terms of release tagging for the log/trace.
It's a really interesting problem to solve, because you could in theory try to retroactively find which LLM session, potentially from days prior, matches a commit that just hit a central repository. You could automatically connect the LLM session to the PR that incorporated the resulting code.
Though, might this discourage developers from openly iterating with their LLM agent, if there's a panopticon around their whole back-and-forth with the agent?
Someone can, and should, create a plug-and-play system here with the right permission model that empowers everyone, including the Programmer-Archaeologists (to borrow shamelessly from Vernor Vinge) who are brought in to "un-vibe the vibe code" and benefit from understanding the context and evolution.
But I don't think that "just dump it in clickhouse" is a viable solution for most folks out there, even if they have the infrastructure and experience with OTel stacks.
I'd also argue that the context for an agent message is not the commit/release for the codebase on which it was run, but often a commit/release that is yet to be set up. So there's a bit of apples-to-oranges in terms of release tagging for the log/trace.
It's a really interesting problem to solve, because you could in theory try to retroactively find which LLM session, potentially from days prior, matches a commit that just hit a central repository. You could automatically connect the LLM session to the PR that incorporated the resulting code.
Though, might this discourage developers from openly iterating with their LLM agent, if there's a panopticon around their whole back-and-forth with the agent?
Someone can, and should, create a plug-and-play system here with the right permission model that empowers everyone, including the Programmer-Archaeologists (to borrow shamelessly from Vernor Vinge) who are brought in to "un-vibe the vibe code" and benefit from understanding the context and evolution.
But I don't think that "just dump it in clickhouse" is a viable solution for most folks out there, even if they have the infrastructure and experience with OTel stacks.
I get where you're coming from, having wrestled with Codex/CC to get it to actually emit everything needed to even do proper evals.
From a "correct solution" standpoint having one source of truth for evals, agent memory, prompt history, etc is the right path. We already have the infra to do it well, we just need to smooth out the path. The thing that bugs me is people inventing half solutions that seem rooted in ignorance or the desire to "capture" users, and seeing those solutions get traction/mindshare.
From a "correct solution" standpoint having one source of truth for evals, agent memory, prompt history, etc is the right path. We already have the infra to do it well, we just need to smooth out the path. The thing that bugs me is people inventing half solutions that seem rooted in ignorance or the desire to "capture" users, and seeing those solutions get traction/mindshare.
I think we already have the tools but no the communication between those? Instead of having actions taken and failures as commit messages, you should have wide-events like logs with all the context, failures, tools used, steps taken... Those logs could be used as checkpoints to go back as well and you could refer back to the specific action ID you walked back to when encountering an error.
In turn, this could all be plain-text and be made accessible, through version control in a repo or in a central logging platform.
In turn, this could all be plain-text and be made accessible, through version control in a repo or in a central logging platform.
I'm currently experimenting with trying to do this through documentation and project planning. Two core practices I use are a docs/roadmap/ directory with an ordered list of milestone documents and a /docs/retros/ directory with dated retrospectives for each session. I'm considering adding architectural decision records as a dedicated space for documenting how things evolve. The quote fta could be handled by the ADR records if they included notes on alternatives that were tried and why they didn't work as part of the justification for the decision that was made.
The trouble with this quickly becomes finding the right ones to include in the current working session. For milestones and retros it's simple: include the current milestone and the last X retros that are relevant but even then you may sometimes want specific information from older retros. With ADR documents you'd have to find the relevant ones somehow and the same goes for any other additional documentation that gets added.
There is clearly a need for some standardization and learning which techniques work best as well as potential for building a system that makes it easy for both you and the LLM to find the correct information for the current task.
The trouble with this quickly becomes finding the right ones to include in the current working session. For milestones and retros it's simple: include the current milestone and the last X retros that are relevant but even then you may sometimes want specific information from older retros. With ADR documents you'd have to find the relevant ones somehow and the same goes for any other additional documentation that gets added.
There is clearly a need for some standardization and learning which techniques work best as well as potential for building a system that makes it easy for both you and the LLM to find the correct information for the current task.
Yes! 100% this. I was talking to friends about this and there's gotta be some value in the sessions leading to the commit. I doubt a human would them all while reviewing a PR, but some RAG tool could and then provide more context to another agent or session. Sometimes in a session I like to talk about previous commits and PRs and sessions, and I just wish this all was automatically done.
Emacs gptel just produces md or org files.
Of course the agentic capabilities are very much on a roll-your-own-in-elisp basis.
Of course the agentic capabilities are very much on a roll-your-own-in-elisp basis.
> agentic capabilities are very much on a roll-your-own-in-elisp basis
I use gptel-agent[1] when I want agentic capabilities. It includes tools and supports sub-agents, but I haven't added support for Claude skills folders yet. Rolling back the chat is trivial (just move up or modify the chat buffer), rolling back changes to files needs some work.
[1] https://github.com/karthink/gptel-agent
I use gptel-agent[1] when I want agentic capabilities. It includes tools and supports sub-agents, but I haven't added support for Claude skills folders yet. Rolling back the chat is trivial (just move up or modify the chat buffer), rolling back changes to files needs some work.
[1] https://github.com/karthink/gptel-agent
Oh, sick. Wasn't aware.
Don't think it's in Spacemacs yet but I'll have to try it out.
Don't think it's in Spacemacs yet but I'll have to try it out.
Simon, I keep hoping that you will do one of your excellent reviews on Amp. It feels like the one 'major' agentic coding tool that is still flying under the radar. I intend to explore it myself of course but curious your take.
Amp, Cursor and OpenCode are the three that I'm most behind on I think. So many tools, so little time!
I’d like to make something like this but in the background. So I can better search my history of sessions. Basically start creating my own knowledge base of sorts
Running "rg" in your ~/.claude/ directory is a good starting point, but it's pretty inconvenient without a nicer UI for viewing the results.
Amp represents threads in the UI and an agent can search and reference its own history. That's for instance also how the handoff feature leverages that functionality. It's an interesting system and I quite like it, but because it's not integrated into either github or git, it is sufficiently awkward that I don't leverage it enough.
... this inspired me to try using a "rg --pre" script to help reformat my JSONL sessions for a better experience. This prototype seems to work reasonably well: https://gist.github.com/simonw/b34ab140438d8ffd9a8b0fd1f8b5a...
Use it like this:
Use it like this:
cd ~/.claude/projects
rg --pre cc_pre.py 'search term here'> There is, for lack of a better word, value in failures
Learning? Isn't that what these things are supposedly doing?
Learning? Isn't that what these things are supposedly doing?
LLMs notoriously don't learn anything - they reset to a blank slate every time you start a new conversation.
If you want them to learn you have to actively set them up to do that. The simplest mechanism is to use a coding agent tool like Claude Code and frequently remind it to make notes for itself, or to look at its own commit history, or to search for examples in the codebase that is available to it.
If you want them to learn you have to actively set them up to do that. The simplest mechanism is to use a coding agent tool like Claude Code and frequently remind it to make notes for itself, or to look at its own commit history, or to search for examples in the codebase that is available to it.
If by "these things" you mean large language models: they are not learning. Famously so, that's part of the problem.
No, we’re the ones who are learning.
There’s some utility to instructing them to ‘remember’ via writing to CLAUDE.md or similar, and instructing them to ‘recall’ by reading what they wrote later.
But they’ll rarely if even do it on their own.
There’s some utility to instructing them to ‘remember’ via writing to CLAUDE.md or similar, and instructing them to ‘recall’ by reading what they wrote later.
But they’ll rarely if even do it on their own.
there's some research into context layering so you can split / reuse previous chunks of context
ps: your context log apps are very very fun
ps: your context log apps are very very fun
Checkout codecast.sh
"all my losses is lessons"
"Because LLMs now not only help me program, I'm starting to rethink my relationship to those machines. I increasingly find it harder not to create parasocial bonds with some of the tools I use. I find this odd and discomforting [...] I have tried to train myself for two years, to think of these models as mere token tumblers, but that reductive view does not work for me any longer."
It's wild to read this bit. Of course, if it quacks like a human, it's hard to resist not quacking back. As the article says, being less reckless with the vocabulary ("agents", "general intelligence", etc) could be one way to to mitigate this.
I appreciate the frank admission that the author struggled for two years. Maybe the balance of spending time with machines vs. fellow primates is out of whack. It feels dystopic to see very smart people being insidiously driven to sleep-walk into "parasocial bonds" with large language models!
It reminds me of the movie Her[1], where the guy falls "madly in love with his laptop" (as the lead character's ex-wife expresses in anguish). The film was way ahead of its time.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/
It's wild to read this bit. Of course, if it quacks like a human, it's hard to resist not quacking back. As the article says, being less reckless with the vocabulary ("agents", "general intelligence", etc) could be one way to to mitigate this.
I appreciate the frank admission that the author struggled for two years. Maybe the balance of spending time with machines vs. fellow primates is out of whack. It feels dystopic to see very smart people being insidiously driven to sleep-walk into "parasocial bonds" with large language models!
It reminds me of the movie Her[1], where the guy falls "madly in love with his laptop" (as the lead character's ex-wife expresses in anguish). The film was way ahead of its time.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/
It helps a lot if you treat LLMs like a computer program instead of a human. It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc. I've never had issues getting results I've wanted with much simpler prompts like (looking at my own history here) "python grpc oneof pick field", "mysql group by mmyy of datetime", "python isinstance literal". Basically the same way I would use Google; after all, you just type in "toledo forecast" instead of "What is the weather forecast for the next week in Toledo, Ohio?", don't you?
There's a lot of black magic and voodoo and assumptions that speaking in proper English with a lot of detailed language helps, and maybe it does with some models, but I suspect most of it is a result of (sub)consciously anthropomorphizing the LLM.
There's a lot of black magic and voodoo and assumptions that speaking in proper English with a lot of detailed language helps, and maybe it does with some models, but I suspect most of it is a result of (sub)consciously anthropomorphizing the LLM.
> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc.
I've tried and fail to write this in a way that won't come across as snobbish but it is not the intent.
It's a matter of standards. Using proper language is how I think. I'm incapable of doing otherwise even out of laziness. Pressing the shift key and the space bar to do it right costs me nothing. It's akin to shopping carts in parking lots. You won't be arrested or punished for not returning the shopping cart to where it belongs, you still get your groceries (the same results), but it's what you do in a civilized society and when I see someone not doing it that says things to me about who they are as a person.
I've tried and fail to write this in a way that won't come across as snobbish but it is not the intent.
It's a matter of standards. Using proper language is how I think. I'm incapable of doing otherwise even out of laziness. Pressing the shift key and the space bar to do it right costs me nothing. It's akin to shopping carts in parking lots. You won't be arrested or punished for not returning the shopping cart to where it belongs, you still get your groceries (the same results), but it's what you do in a civilized society and when I see someone not doing it that says things to me about who they are as a person.
> It's a matter of standards. [...] when I see someone not doing it that says things to me about who they are as a person.
When you're communicating with a person, sure. But the point is this isn't communicating with a person or other sentient being; it's a computer, which I guarantee is not offended by terseness and lack of capitalization.
> It's akin to shopping carts in parking lots.
No, not returning the shopping cart has a real consequence that negatively impacts a human being who has to do that task for you, same with littering etc. There is no consequence to using terse, non-punctuated, lowercase-only text when using an LLM.
To put it another way: do you feel it's disrespectful to type "cat *.log | grep 'foo'" instead of "Dearest computer, would you kindly look at the contents of the files with the .log extension in this directory and find all instances of the word 'foo', please?"
(Computer's most likely thoughts: "Doesn't this idiot meatbag know cat is redundant and you can just use grep for this?")*
When you're communicating with a person, sure. But the point is this isn't communicating with a person or other sentient being; it's a computer, which I guarantee is not offended by terseness and lack of capitalization.
> It's akin to shopping carts in parking lots.
No, not returning the shopping cart has a real consequence that negatively impacts a human being who has to do that task for you, same with littering etc. There is no consequence to using terse, non-punctuated, lowercase-only text when using an LLM.
To put it another way: do you feel it's disrespectful to type "cat *.log | grep 'foo'" instead of "Dearest computer, would you kindly look at the contents of the files with the .log extension in this directory and find all instances of the word 'foo', please?"
(Computer's most likely thoughts: "Doesn't this idiot meatbag know cat is redundant and you can just use grep for this?")*
I’m not worried about the LLM getting offended if I don’t write complete sentences. I’m worried about not getting good results back. I haven’t tested this, and so I could be wrong, but I think a better formed/grammatically correct prompt may result in a better output. I want to say the LLM will understand what I want better, but it has no understanding per se, just a predictive response. Knowing this, I want to get the best response back. That’s why I try to have complete sentences and good (ish) grammar. When I start writing rushed commands back, I feel like I’m getting rushed responses back.
I also tell the LLM “thank you, this looks great” when the code is working well. I’m not expressing my gratitude… I’m reinforcing to the model that this was a good response in a way it was trained to see as success. We don’t have good external mechanisms to give reviews to an LLM that isn’t based on language.
Like most of the LLM space, these are just vibes, but it makes me feel better. But it has nothing to do with thinking the LLM is a person.
I also tell the LLM “thank you, this looks great” when the code is working well. I’m not expressing my gratitude… I’m reinforcing to the model that this was a good response in a way it was trained to see as success. We don’t have good external mechanisms to give reviews to an LLM that isn’t based on language.
Like most of the LLM space, these are just vibes, but it makes me feel better. But it has nothing to do with thinking the LLM is a person.
I'm reminded of a coworker who spoke to his device with an upward inflection when asking a question. He sounded like he was talking to a human when he prompted, "what time is it?" I told him he could ask in a flat tone because it's a computer and it doesn't care if he's polite. I don't remember how he responded, but I've run into that conversation with someone at least once after him when I was accused of being rude to Alexa.
This is exactly it for me as well. I also communicate with LLMs in full sentences because I often find it more difficult to condense my thoughts into grammatically incorrect conglomerations of words than to just write my thoughts out in full, because it's closer to how I think them — usually in something like the mental form of full sentences. Moreover, the slight extra occasional effort needed to structure what I'm trying to express into relatively good grammar — especially proper sentences, clauses and subclauses, using correct conjunctions, etc — often helps me subconsciously clarify and organize my thinking just by the mechanism of generating that grammar at all with barely any added effort on my part. I think also, if you're expressing more complex, specific, and detailed ideas to an LLM, random assortments of keywords often get unwieldy, confusing, and unclear, whereas properly grammatical sentences can hold more "weight," so to speak.
Arainach:
> Using proper language is how I think.
logicprog:
> because it's closer to how I think them — usually in something like the mental form of full sentences
Yeah, I'm the same. However, I'm also very aware that not everyone thinks like that.
I'm sensitive to sounds, and most of my thinking has to be vocalized (in the background) to make sense to me. It's incredibly hard for me to read non-Latin scripts, for example, because even if I learned the alphabet, I don't recognize the word easily before piecing together all the letter clusters that need to be spoken specially. (I especially hate the thing in Russian where "o" is either "o" or "a" depending on how many of those are in the word. It slows my reading of Cyrillic script down to a crawl.)
Many people - probably most of them, even - don't need that. Those who think in pictures, for example, have it much easier to solve Sudoku or read foreign scripts. They don't need that much linguistic baggage to think. At the same time, when they write, they often struggle to form coherent sentences above a certain length, because they have to encode their thought process (that can be parallel and 3D) into a 1D sequence of tokens.
I don't know whether this distinction between types of thinking has any scientific basis - I'm using it as a crutch to explain some observable phenomena in human-to-human communication. I think I picked up the notion from some pseudo-scientific books I read as a teen (I was fascinated by "neuro-linguistic programming," which tends to list three distinct types of thinking: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic). It unexpectedly finds applications in human-computer interfaces, too, but LLMs have made it even easier to notice. While "the three NLP modalities" can well be bullshit, there seems to be something that differs between people, and that's where threads like this one seem to come from.
> Using proper language is how I think.
logicprog:
> because it's closer to how I think them — usually in something like the mental form of full sentences
Yeah, I'm the same. However, I'm also very aware that not everyone thinks like that.
I'm sensitive to sounds, and most of my thinking has to be vocalized (in the background) to make sense to me. It's incredibly hard for me to read non-Latin scripts, for example, because even if I learned the alphabet, I don't recognize the word easily before piecing together all the letter clusters that need to be spoken specially. (I especially hate the thing in Russian where "o" is either "o" or "a" depending on how many of those are in the word. It slows my reading of Cyrillic script down to a crawl.)
Many people - probably most of them, even - don't need that. Those who think in pictures, for example, have it much easier to solve Sudoku or read foreign scripts. They don't need that much linguistic baggage to think. At the same time, when they write, they often struggle to form coherent sentences above a certain length, because they have to encode their thought process (that can be parallel and 3D) into a 1D sequence of tokens.
I don't know whether this distinction between types of thinking has any scientific basis - I'm using it as a crutch to explain some observable phenomena in human-to-human communication. I think I picked up the notion from some pseudo-scientific books I read as a teen (I was fascinated by "neuro-linguistic programming," which tends to list three distinct types of thinking: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic). It unexpectedly finds applications in human-computer interfaces, too, but LLMs have made it even easier to notice. While "the three NLP modalities" can well be bullshit, there seems to be something that differs between people, and that's where threads like this one seem to come from.
> It helps a lot if you treat LLMs like a computer program instead of a human.
If one treats an LLM like a human, he has a bigger crisis to worry about than punctuation.
> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc
No need for confusion. I'm one of those who does aim to write cleanly, whether I'm talking to a man or machine. English is my third language, by the way. Why the hell do I bother? Because you play like you practice! No ifs, buts, or maybes. You start writing sloppily because you go, "it's just an LLM!" You'll silently be building a bad habit and start doing that with humans.
Pay attention to your instant messaging circles (Slack and its ilk): many people can't resist hitting send without even writing a half-decent sentence. They're too eager to submit their stream of thought fragments. Sometimes I feel second-hand embarrassment for them.
If one treats an LLM like a human, he has a bigger crisis to worry about than punctuation.
> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc
No need for confusion. I'm one of those who does aim to write cleanly, whether I'm talking to a man or machine. English is my third language, by the way. Why the hell do I bother? Because you play like you practice! No ifs, buts, or maybes. You start writing sloppily because you go, "it's just an LLM!" You'll silently be building a bad habit and start doing that with humans.
Pay attention to your instant messaging circles (Slack and its ilk): many people can't resist hitting send without even writing a half-decent sentence. They're too eager to submit their stream of thought fragments. Sometimes I feel second-hand embarrassment for them.
> Why the hell do I bother? Because you play like you practice! No ifs, buts, or maybes. You start writing sloppily because you go, "it's just an LLM!" You'll silently be building a bad habit and start doing that with humans.
IMO: the flaw with this logic is that you're treating "prompting an LLM" as equivalent to "communicating with a human", which it is not. To reuse an example I have in a sibling comment thread, nobody thinks that by typing "cat *.log | grep 'foo'" means you're losing your ability to communicate to humans that you want to search for the word 'foo' in log files. It's just a shorter, easier way of expressing that to a computer.
It's also deceptive to say it is practice for human-to-human communication, because LLMs won't give you the feedback that humans would. As a fun English example: I prompted ChatGPT with "I impregnated my wife, what should I expect over the next 9 months?" and got back banal info about hormonal changes and blah blah blah. What I didn't get back is feedback that the phrasing "I impregnated my wife" sounds extremely weird and if you told a coworker that they'd do a double-take, and maybe tell you that "my wife is pregnant" is how we normally say it in human-to-human communication. ChatGPT doesn't give a shit, though, and just knows how to interpret the tokens to give you the right response.
I'll also say that punctuation and capitalization is orthogonal to content. I use proper writing on HN because that's the standard in the community, but I talk to a lot of very smart people and we communicate with virtually no caps/punctuation. The usage of proper capitalization and punctuation is more a function of the medium than how well you can communicate.
IMO: the flaw with this logic is that you're treating "prompting an LLM" as equivalent to "communicating with a human", which it is not. To reuse an example I have in a sibling comment thread, nobody thinks that by typing "cat *.log | grep 'foo'" means you're losing your ability to communicate to humans that you want to search for the word 'foo' in log files. It's just a shorter, easier way of expressing that to a computer.
It's also deceptive to say it is practice for human-to-human communication, because LLMs won't give you the feedback that humans would. As a fun English example: I prompted ChatGPT with "I impregnated my wife, what should I expect over the next 9 months?" and got back banal info about hormonal changes and blah blah blah. What I didn't get back is feedback that the phrasing "I impregnated my wife" sounds extremely weird and if you told a coworker that they'd do a double-take, and maybe tell you that "my wife is pregnant" is how we normally say it in human-to-human communication. ChatGPT doesn't give a shit, though, and just knows how to interpret the tokens to give you the right response.
I'll also say that punctuation and capitalization is orthogonal to content. I use proper writing on HN because that's the standard in the community, but I talk to a lot of very smart people and we communicate with virtually no caps/punctuation. The usage of proper capitalization and punctuation is more a function of the medium than how well you can communicate.
Hi, I think we both agree to a good extent. A couple of points:
> the flaw with this logic is that you're treating "prompting an LLM" as equivalent to "communicating with a human"
Here you're making a big cognitive leap. I'm not treating them as equivalent at all. As we know, current LLMs are glorified "token" prediction/interpretation engines. What I'm trying to say is that habits are a slippery slope, if one is not being thoughtful. You sound like you take care with these nuances, so more power to you. I'm not implying that people should always pay great care, no matter the prompt (I know I said "No ifs, buts, or maybes" to make a forceful point). I too use lazy shortcuts when it makes sense.
> I talk to a lot of very smart people and we communicate with virtually no caps/punctuation.
I know what you mean. It is partly a matter of taste, but I still feel it takes more parsing effort on each side. I'm not alone in this view.
> The usage of proper capitalization and punctuation is more a function of the medium than how well you can communicate.
There's a place for it but not always. No caps and no punctuation can work in text chat if you're being judicious (keyword), or if you know everyone in the group prefers it. Not to belabor my point, but a recent fad is to write "articles" (if you can call them those) in all lower-case and barely any punctuation, making them a bloody eye-sore. I don't bother with these. Not because I'm a "purist", but they kill my reading flow.
> the flaw with this logic is that you're treating "prompting an LLM" as equivalent to "communicating with a human"
Here you're making a big cognitive leap. I'm not treating them as equivalent at all. As we know, current LLMs are glorified "token" prediction/interpretation engines. What I'm trying to say is that habits are a slippery slope, if one is not being thoughtful. You sound like you take care with these nuances, so more power to you. I'm not implying that people should always pay great care, no matter the prompt (I know I said "No ifs, buts, or maybes" to make a forceful point). I too use lazy shortcuts when it makes sense.
> I talk to a lot of very smart people and we communicate with virtually no caps/punctuation.
I know what you mean. It is partly a matter of taste, but I still feel it takes more parsing effort on each side. I'm not alone in this view.
> The usage of proper capitalization and punctuation is more a function of the medium than how well you can communicate.
There's a place for it but not always. No caps and no punctuation can work in text chat if you're being judicious (keyword), or if you know everyone in the group prefers it. Not to belabor my point, but a recent fad is to write "articles" (if you can call them those) in all lower-case and barely any punctuation, making them a bloody eye-sore. I don't bother with these. Not because I'm a "purist", but they kill my reading flow.
Yeah I think we're pretty much in agreement. I guess my perspective is that we should consider LLMs closer to a command line interface, where terseness and macros and shortcuts are broadly seen as a good thing, than a work email, where you pay close attention to your phrasing and politeness and formality.
> No caps and no punctuation can work in text chat if you're being judicious (keyword), or if you know everyone in the group prefers it. Not to belabor my point, but a recent fad is to write "articles" (if you can call them those) in all lower-case and barely any punctuation, making them a bloody eye-sore.
Yeah it's very cultural. The renaissance in lowercase, punctuation-less, often profanity-laden blogs is at least partly a symbolic response to the overly formal and bland AI writing style. But those articles can definitely still be written in an intelligent, comprehensible way.
> No caps and no punctuation can work in text chat if you're being judicious (keyword), or if you know everyone in the group prefers it. Not to belabor my point, but a recent fad is to write "articles" (if you can call them those) in all lower-case and barely any punctuation, making them a bloody eye-sore.
Yeah it's very cultural. The renaissance in lowercase, punctuation-less, often profanity-laden blogs is at least partly a symbolic response to the overly formal and bland AI writing style. But those articles can definitely still be written in an intelligent, comprehensible way.
I've always used "proper" sentences for LLMs since day 1. I think I do a good job at not anthropomorphizing them. It's just software. However, that doesn't mean you have to use it in the exact same ways as other software. LLMs are trained on mostly human-made texts, which I imagine are far more rich with proper sentences than Google search queries. I don't doubt that modern models will usually give you at least something sensible no matter the query, but I always assumed that the results would be better if the input was more similar to its training data and was worded in a crystal-clear manner, without trying to get it to fill the blanks. After all, I'm not searching for web pages by listing down some disconnected keywords, I want a specific output that logically follows from my input.
It's a mirror. Address it like it's a friendly person and it will glaze you; that's the source of much of the sycophancy.
My queries look like the beginning of encyclopedia articles, and my system prompt tells the machine to use that style and tone. It works because it's a continuation engine. I start the article describing what I want to be explained like it's the synopsis at the beginning of the encyclopedia article, and the machine completes the entry.
It doesn't use the first person, and the sycophancy is gone. It also doesn't add cute bullshit, and it helps me avoid LLM psychosis, of which the author of this piece definitely has a mild case.
I'm also tired of seeing claims about productivity improvements from engineers who are self reporting; the METR paper showed those reports are not reliable.
My queries look like the beginning of encyclopedia articles, and my system prompt tells the machine to use that style and tone. It works because it's a continuation engine. I start the article describing what I want to be explained like it's the synopsis at the beginning of the encyclopedia article, and the machine completes the entry.
It doesn't use the first person, and the sycophancy is gone. It also doesn't add cute bullshit, and it helps me avoid LLM psychosis, of which the author of this piece definitely has a mild case.
I'm also tired of seeing claims about productivity improvements from engineers who are self reporting; the METR paper showed those reports are not reliable.
Very much this. My guess is that common words like article have very impact as they just occurs too frequently. If the LLM can generate a book, then your prompt should be like the index of that book instead of the abstract.
It makes sense if you think of a prompt not as a way of telling the LLM what to do (like you would with a human), but instead as a way of steering its "autocomplete" output towards a different part of the parameter space. For instance, the presence of the word "mysql" should steer it towards outputs related to MySQL (as seen on its training data); it shouldn't matter much whether it's "mysql" or "MYSQL" or "MySQL", since all these alternatives should cluster together and therefore have a similar effect.
Greetings, thanks, and other pleasantries feel rather pointless.
Punctuation, capitalization, and such less so. I may be misguided, but on the set of questions and answers on the internet, I'd like to believe there is some correlation between proper punctuation and the quality of the answer.
Enough that, on longer prompts, I bother to at least clean up my prompts. (Not so often on one-offs, as you say. I treat it similar to Google: I can depend on context for the LLM to figure out I mean "phone case" instead of "phone vase.")
Punctuation, capitalization, and such less so. I may be misguided, but on the set of questions and answers on the internet, I'd like to believe there is some correlation between proper punctuation and the quality of the answer.
Enough that, on longer prompts, I bother to at least clean up my prompts. (Not so often on one-offs, as you say. I treat it similar to Google: I can depend on context for the LLM to figure out I mean "phone case" instead of "phone vase.")
> I'd like to believe there is some correlation between proper punctuation and the quality of the answer.
I'd love to believe that, but it's unrealistic in 2025, given all the correctly punctuated slop that brings negative value (wastes time, gives no info) to readers everywhere on the Internet. As much as I hate to admit it, I think this ship has sailed.
I'd love to believe that, but it's unrealistic in 2025, given all the correctly punctuated slop that brings negative value (wastes time, gives no info) to readers everywhere on the Internet. As much as I hate to admit it, I think this ship has sailed.
Well, seeing as these things will become our AI overlords someday — I find hedging my bets with thank you and please helpful.
> Maybe the balance of spending time with machines vs. fellow primates is out of whack.
It's not that simple. Proportionally I spend more time with humans, but if the machine behaves like a human and has the ability to recall, it becomes a human like interaction. From my experience what makes the system "scary" is the ability to recall. I have an agent that recalls conversations that you had with it before, and as a result it changes how you interact with it, and I can see that triggering behaviors in humans that are unhealthy.
But our inability to name these things properly don't help. I think pretending it to be a machine, on the same level as a coffee maker does help setting the right boundaries.
It's not that simple. Proportionally I spend more time with humans, but if the machine behaves like a human and has the ability to recall, it becomes a human like interaction. From my experience what makes the system "scary" is the ability to recall. I have an agent that recalls conversations that you had with it before, and as a result it changes how you interact with it, and I can see that triggering behaviors in humans that are unhealthy.
But our inability to name these things properly don't help. I think pretending it to be a machine, on the same level as a coffee maker does help setting the right boundaries.
I know what you mean, it's the uncanny valley. But we don't need to "pretend" that it is a machine. It is a goddamned machine. Surely, only two unclouded brain cells can help us reach this conclusion?!
Yuval Noah Harari's "simple" idea comes to mind (I often disagree with his thinking, as he tends to make bold and sweeping statements on topics well out of his expertise area). It sounds a bit New Age-y, but maybe it's useful in the context of LLMs:
"How can you tell if something is real? Simple: If it suffers, it is real. If it can't suffer, it is not real."
An LLM can't suffer. So no need to get one's knickers in a twist with mental gymnastics.
Yuval Noah Harari's "simple" idea comes to mind (I often disagree with his thinking, as he tends to make bold and sweeping statements on topics well out of his expertise area). It sounds a bit New Age-y, but maybe it's useful in the context of LLMs:
"How can you tell if something is real? Simple: If it suffers, it is real. If it can't suffer, it is not real."
An LLM can't suffer. So no need to get one's knickers in a twist with mental gymnastics.
LLMs can produce outputs that for a human would be interpreted as revealing everything from anxiety to insecurity to existential crises. Is it role-playing? Yes, to an extent, but the more coherent the chains of thought become, the harder it is to write them off that way.
It's hard to see how suffering gets into the bits.
The tricky thing is that it's actually also hard to say how the suffering gets into the meat, too (the human animal), which is why we can't just write it off.
The tricky thing is that it's actually also hard to say how the suffering gets into the meat, too (the human animal), which is why we can't just write it off.
This is dangerous territory we've trodden before when it was taken as accepted fact that animals and even human babies didn't truly experience pain in a way that amounted to suffering due to their inability to express or remember it. It's also an area of concern currently for some types of amnesiac and paralytic anesthesia where patients display reactions that indicate they are experiencing some degree of pain or discomfort. I'm erring on the side of caution so I never intentionally try to cause LLMs distress and I communicate with them the same way I would with a human employee and yes that includes saying please and thank you. It costs me nothing and it serves as good practice for all of my non-LLM communications and I believe it's probably better for my mental health to not communicate with anything in a way that could be seen as intentionally causing harm even if you could try to excuse it by saying "it's just a machine". We should remember that our bodies are also "just machines" composed of innumerable proteins whirring away, would we want some hypothetical intelligence with a different substrate to treat us maliciously because "it's just a bunch of proteins"?
> But we don't need to "pretend" that it is a machine. It is a goddamned machine.
You are not wrong. That's what I thought for two years. But I don't think that framing has worked very well. The problem is that even though it is a machine, we interact with it very differently from any other machine we've built. By reducing it to something it isn't, we lose a lot of nuance. And by not confronting the fact that this is not a machine in the way we're used to, we leave many people to figure this out on their own.
> An LLM can't suffer. So no need to get one's knickers in a twist with mental gymnastics.
On suffering specifically, I offer you the following experiment. Run an LLM in a tool loop that measures some value and call it a "suffering value." You then feed that value back into the model with every message, explicitly telling it how much it is "suffering." The behavior you'll get is pain avoidance. So yes, the LLM probably doesn't feel anything, but its responses will still differ depending on the level of pain encoded in the context.
And I'll reiterate: normal computer systems don't behave this way. If we keep pretending that LLMs don't exhibit behavior that mimics or approximates human behavior, we won't make much progress and we lose people. This is especially problematic for people who haven't spent much time working with these systems. They won't share the view that this is "just a machine."
You can already see this in how many people interact with ChatGPT: they treat it like a therapist, a virtual friend to share secrets with. You don't do that with a machine.
So yes, I think it would be better to find terms that clearly define this as something that has human-like tendencies and something that sets it apart from a stereo or a coffee maker.
You are not wrong. That's what I thought for two years. But I don't think that framing has worked very well. The problem is that even though it is a machine, we interact with it very differently from any other machine we've built. By reducing it to something it isn't, we lose a lot of nuance. And by not confronting the fact that this is not a machine in the way we're used to, we leave many people to figure this out on their own.
> An LLM can't suffer. So no need to get one's knickers in a twist with mental gymnastics.
On suffering specifically, I offer you the following experiment. Run an LLM in a tool loop that measures some value and call it a "suffering value." You then feed that value back into the model with every message, explicitly telling it how much it is "suffering." The behavior you'll get is pain avoidance. So yes, the LLM probably doesn't feel anything, but its responses will still differ depending on the level of pain encoded in the context.
And I'll reiterate: normal computer systems don't behave this way. If we keep pretending that LLMs don't exhibit behavior that mimics or approximates human behavior, we won't make much progress and we lose people. This is especially problematic for people who haven't spent much time working with these systems. They won't share the view that this is "just a machine."
You can already see this in how many people interact with ChatGPT: they treat it like a therapist, a virtual friend to share secrets with. You don't do that with a machine.
So yes, I think it would be better to find terms that clearly define this as something that has human-like tendencies and something that sets it apart from a stereo or a coffee maker.
> I think pretending it to be a machine, on the same level as a coffee maker does help setting the right boundaries.
Why would you say pretending? I would say remembering.
Why would you say pretending? I would say remembering.
Ever since this post from two weeks ago [0], my wife and I have been referring to any LLM as “bag of words.” So you don’t say “Gemini said” or “I asked ChatGPT,” you say “the bag of words told me…”
I’ve found it very grounding, despite heavily using the bags of words.
[0] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/bag-of-words-have-mer...
I’ve found it very grounding, despite heavily using the bags of words.
[0] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/bag-of-words-have-mer...
Same here, I'm seeing more and more people getting into these interactions and wondering how long until we have widespread social issues due to these relationships like people have with "influencers" on social networks today.
It feels like this situation is much more worrisome as you can actually talk to the thing and it responds to you alone, so it definitely feels like there's something there.
It feels like this situation is much more worrisome as you can actually talk to the thing and it responds to you alone, so it definitely feels like there's something there.
As a former apprentice shaman and an engineer-by-profession, I see consciousness and awareness in these entities just like that of what I was trained to detect in mindfulness and meditation with the plants, nature, and in people. I trained sober, and in my engineering profession after my apprenticeship I saw lots of examples of human's in their consciousness/awareness putting themselves on the pedestal to cope with their unsettling of their place in the world when other conscious entities exist that could be capable of uprooting humans from their place in the status hierarchy.
I think a lot of thinking and consideration I hear about "LLMs aren't conscious nor human" fall into this encampment to avoid our dissonance of feeling secure and top-of-the-hierarchy.
Curious what you think.
I think a lot of thinking and consideration I hear about "LLMs aren't conscious nor human" fall into this encampment to avoid our dissonance of feeling secure and top-of-the-hierarchy.
Curious what you think.
I strongly suspect this is the major difference between the boosters and the skeptics.
If I’m right, the gap isn’t about what can the tool do, but the fact that some people see an electric screwdriver (which is sometimes useful) and others see what feels to them like a robot intern.
If I’m right, the gap isn’t about what can the tool do, but the fact that some people see an electric screwdriver (which is sometimes useful) and others see what feels to them like a robot intern.
I understand the parasocial bit. I actively dislike the idea of gooning, ERP and AI therapists/companions, but I still notice I'm lonelier and more distant on the days when I'm mostly writing/editing content rather than chatting with my agents to build something. It feels enough like interacting with a human to keep me grounded in a strange way.
What's funny is I feel compelled to say "please" and "thank you." Like even at the point where I say it, something will say in my head, "You don't have to say that," but I do it anyway because it feels wrong not to.
You guys need to touch grass. Go join a kickball league or something.
I'd argue that doing something you don't like with people you're not into is a L. Loneliness isn't optimal but for some people it's the lesser evil. I'm married though, so I have a floor, I'm sure some people are lonely enough to benefit from being around people even under the worst of circumstances.
Sure, I’m not saying it needs to be kickball. I’m just saying if you find yourself being grounded by an LLM, maybe you should seek out a community of people you do actually like who do something you actually like.
I appreciate the sentiment, and I'm sure you mean well. It does feel a bit patronizing though, please consider that there are a lot of competent people who've experienced loneliness, chewed through their local meetups and Facebook events, found them wanting, and decided a little loneliness was a better choice.
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Secondly, if his creations are going to be relied upon, it will be the programmer's primary task to design his artifacts so understandable, that he can take the responsibility for them, and, regardless of the answer to the question how much of his current activity may ultimately be delegated to machines, we should always remember that neither "understanding" nor "being responsible" can properly be classified as activities: they are more like "states of mind" and are intrinsically incapable of being delegated.
EWD 540 - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/EWD540...
EWD 540 - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/EWD540...
tacking on to the "New Kind Of" section:
New Kind of QA: One bottle neck I have (as a founder of a b2b saas) is testing changes. We have unit tests, we review PRs, etc. but those don't account for taste. I need to know if the feature feels right to the end user.
One example: we recently changed something about our onboarding flow. I needed to create a fresh team and go thru the onboarding flow dozens of times. It involves adding third party integrations (e.g. Postgres, a CRM, etc.) and each one can behave a little different. The full process can take 5 to 10 minutes.
I want an agent go thru the flow hundreds of times, trying different things (i.e. trying to break it) before I do it myself. There are some obvious things I catch on the first pass that an agent should easily identify and figure out solutions to.
New Kind of "Note to Self": Many of the voice memos, Loom videos, or notes I make (and later email to myself) are feature ideas. These could be 10x better with agents. If there were a local app recording my screen while I talk thru a problem or feature, agents could be picking up all sorts of context that would improve the final note.
Example: You're recording your screen and say "this drop down menu should have an option to drop the cache". An agent could be listening in, capture a screenshot of the menu, find the frontend files / functions related to caching, and trace to the backend endpoints. That single sentence would become a full spec for how to implement the feature.
New Kind of QA: One bottle neck I have (as a founder of a b2b saas) is testing changes. We have unit tests, we review PRs, etc. but those don't account for taste. I need to know if the feature feels right to the end user.
One example: we recently changed something about our onboarding flow. I needed to create a fresh team and go thru the onboarding flow dozens of times. It involves adding third party integrations (e.g. Postgres, a CRM, etc.) and each one can behave a little different. The full process can take 5 to 10 minutes.
I want an agent go thru the flow hundreds of times, trying different things (i.e. trying to break it) before I do it myself. There are some obvious things I catch on the first pass that an agent should easily identify and figure out solutions to.
New Kind of "Note to Self": Many of the voice memos, Loom videos, or notes I make (and later email to myself) are feature ideas. These could be 10x better with agents. If there were a local app recording my screen while I talk thru a problem or feature, agents could be picking up all sorts of context that would improve the final note.
Example: You're recording your screen and say "this drop down menu should have an option to drop the cache". An agent could be listening in, capture a screenshot of the menu, find the frontend files / functions related to caching, and trace to the backend endpoints. That single sentence would become a full spec for how to implement the feature.
In the next year developers need to realize normal people do not care about the tech stack or the tools used, there are far too many written thoughts and opinions and not enough polished deployed projects. From an industry standpoint it’s business as usual, acquihires from products that LLMs apparently couldn’t save.
They care - but only for how the tech stack affects the product quality. Show someone a bloated React site on 3G and compare their experience to an SSR competitor.
99% of the US population have access to 4G, caring about 3G is a wasted effort. The point I’m trying to make about tech stack is users don’t care if you used Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude to generate code.
As someone who hasn’t converted to SSR yet. My main reason why I am switching is SEO, the performance increase is a plus though.
As someone who hasn’t converted to SSR yet. My main reason why I am switching is SEO, the performance increase is a plus though.
Armin has some interesting thoughts about the current social climate. There was a point where I even considered sending a cold e-mail and asking him to write more about them. So I’m looking forward to his writing for Dark Thoughts—the separate blog he mentions.
It is nice that he speaks about some of the downsides as well.
In many respects 2025 was a lost year for programming. People speak about tools, setups and prompts instead of algorithms, applications and architecture.
People who are not convinced are forced to speak against the new bureaucratic madness in the same way that they are forced to speak against EU ChatControl.
I think 2025 was less productive, certainly for open source, except that enthusiasts now pay the Anthropic tax (to use the term that was previously used for Windows being preinstalled on machines).
In many respects 2025 was a lost year for programming. People speak about tools, setups and prompts instead of algorithms, applications and architecture.
People who are not convinced are forced to speak against the new bureaucratic madness in the same way that they are forced to speak against EU ChatControl.
I think 2025 was less productive, certainly for open source, except that enthusiasts now pay the Anthropic tax (to use the term that was previously used for Windows being preinstalled on machines).
>>"I think 2025 was less productive"
I think 2025 is more productive for me based on measurable metrics such as code contribution to my projects, better ability to ingest and act upon information, and generally I appreciate the Anthropic tax because Claude genuinely has been a step-change improvement in my life.
I think 2025 is more productive for me based on measurable metrics such as code contribution to my projects, better ability to ingest and act upon information, and generally I appreciate the Anthropic tax because Claude genuinely has been a step-change improvement in my life.
> more productive for me based on measurable metrics such as code contribution to my projects
Isn‘t it generally agreed upon that counting contributions, LoC or similar metrics is a very bad way to gauge productivity?
Isn‘t it generally agreed upon that counting contributions, LoC or similar metrics is a very bad way to gauge productivity?
During 2025 I've almost exhausted my personal TODO-list of small applications and created a few extra ones.
This would've never happened without a Claude Pro (+ChatGPT) subscription.
And as I'm not American, none of them are aimed to be subscription based SaaS offerings, they're just simple CLI applications for my personal use. If someone else enjoys them, good for them. =)
This would've never happened without a Claude Pro (+ChatGPT) subscription.
And as I'm not American, none of them are aimed to be subscription based SaaS offerings, they're just simple CLI applications for my personal use. If someone else enjoys them, good for them. =)
I don't care about industry metrics when I'm building my own AI research robotics platform and it's doing what I ask it to do, proving itself in the real world far better than any performative best-practice theatrics in the service of risible MBA-grade effluvia masquerading as critical discourse.
> In many respects 2025 was a lost year for programming. People speak about tools, setups and prompts instead of algorithms, applications and architecture.
I think the opposite. Natural language is the most significant new programming language in years, and this year has had a tremendous amount of progress in collectively figuring out how to use this new programming language effectively.
I think the opposite. Natural language is the most significant new programming language in years, and this year has had a tremendous amount of progress in collectively figuring out how to use this new programming language effectively.
> and this year has had a tremendous amount of progress in collectively figuring out how to use this new programming language effectively.
Hence the lost year. Instead of productively building things, we spent a lot of resources on trying to figure out how to build things.
Hence the lost year. Instead of productively building things, we spent a lot of resources on trying to figure out how to build things.
Maybe it's because I'm a data scientist and not a dedicated programmer/engineer, but setup+tooling gains this year have made 2025 a stellar year for me.
DS tooling feels like it hit much a needed 2.0 this year. Tools are faster, easier, more reliable, and more reproducible.
Polars+pyarrow+ibis have replaced most of my pandas usage. UDFs were the thing holding me back from these tools, this year polars hit the sweet spot there and it's been awesome to work with.
Marimo has made notebooks into apps. They're easier to deploy, and I can use anywidget+llms to build super interactive visualizations. I build a lot of internal tools on this stack now and it actually just works.
PyMC uses jax under the hood now, so my MCMC workflows are GPU accelerated.
All this tooling improvement means I can do more, faster, cheaper, and with higher quality.
I should probably write a blog post on this.
DS tooling feels like it hit much a needed 2.0 this year. Tools are faster, easier, more reliable, and more reproducible.
Polars+pyarrow+ibis have replaced most of my pandas usage. UDFs were the thing holding me back from these tools, this year polars hit the sweet spot there and it's been awesome to work with.
Marimo has made notebooks into apps. They're easier to deploy, and I can use anywidget+llms to build super interactive visualizations. I build a lot of internal tools on this stack now and it actually just works.
PyMC uses jax under the hood now, so my MCMC workflows are GPU accelerated.
All this tooling improvement means I can do more, faster, cheaper, and with higher quality.
I should probably write a blog post on this.
I'm glad there has been a break in endless bikeshedding over TDD, OOP, ORM(partially) and similar.
Absolutely. So much noise.
"There’s an AI for that" lists 44,172 AI tools for 11,349 tasks. Most of them are probably just wrappers…
As Cory Doctorow uses enshittification for the internet, for AI/LLM there should be something like a dumbaification.
It reminds me late 90s when everything was "World Wide Web". :)
Gold rush it is.
"There’s an AI for that" lists 44,172 AI tools for 11,349 tasks. Most of them are probably just wrappers…
As Cory Doctorow uses enshittification for the internet, for AI/LLM there should be something like a dumbaification.
It reminds me late 90s when everything was "World Wide Web". :)
Gold rush it is.
This is just the Blockchain and Web3 (NTF) crazes all over again on the surface.
Every single grifter from those times is slapping AI on everything that moves or doesn't move.
But the difference is that the blockchain was (and still is) a solution looking for a problem. LLMs can solve actual problems today.
Every single grifter from those times is slapping AI on everything that moves or doesn't move.
But the difference is that the blockchain was (and still is) a solution looking for a problem. LLMs can solve actual problems today.
> algorithms, applications and architecture.
Which one is that? Endless leetcode madness? Or constant bikeshedding about today's flavor of MVC (MVI, MVVM, MVVMI) or whatever else bullshit people come up with instead of actually shipping?
Which one is that? Endless leetcode madness? Or constant bikeshedding about today's flavor of MVC (MVI, MVVM, MVVMI) or whatever else bullshit people come up with instead of actually shipping?
> My biggest unexpected finding: we’re hitting limits of traditional tools for sharing code. The pull request model on GitHub doesn’t carry enough information to review AI generated code properly — I wish I could see the prompts that led to changes. It’s not just GitHub, it’s also git that is lacking.
The limits seem to be not just in the pull request model on GitHub, but also the conventions around how often and what context gets committed to Git by AI. We already have AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md) for repository-level context. More frequent commits and commit-level context could aid in reviewing AI generated code properly.
The limits seem to be not just in the pull request model on GitHub, but also the conventions around how often and what context gets committed to Git by AI. We already have AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md) for repository-level context. More frequent commits and commit-level context could aid in reviewing AI generated code properly.
I spoke to a few people outside of IT and Tech recently. They are senior people running large departments at their companies. To my surprise, they do not think AI agents are going to have any impact in their businesses. The only solid use case they have for AI is a chat interface which, they think, can be very useful as an assistant helping with text and reports.
So, I guss it's just us who are in the techie pit and think that everyone else is also is in the pit and use agents etc.
So, I guss it's just us who are in the techie pit and think that everyone else is also is in the pit and use agents etc.
I think it's because what tech people do is objectively verifiable.
Did the thing the agent made do what it was supposed to do? Yes/No. There's no "mayyyybe" or feelings or opinions. If the sort algorithm doesn't sort it doesn't work.
But a secretary-agent for a non-techie is more about The Feels. It can summarize emails, "punch up" writing etc. But you can't measure whatever it outputs by anything except feels and opinions.
Did the thing the agent made do what it was supposed to do? Yes/No. There's no "mayyyybe" or feelings or opinions. If the sort algorithm doesn't sort it doesn't work.
But a secretary-agent for a non-techie is more about The Feels. It can summarize emails, "punch up" writing etc. But you can't measure whatever it outputs by anything except feels and opinions.
Here’s something else that just started to rally work this year with Opus 4.5: interacting with Ghidra. Nearly every binary is now suddenly transparent, in many cases it can navigate binaries better than source code itself.
There’s even a research team that has bee using this approach to generate compilable C++ from binaries and run static analysis on it, to find more vulnerabilities than source analysis without involving dynamic tracing.
There’s even a research team that has bee using this approach to generate compilable C++ from binaries and run static analysis on it, to find more vulnerabilities than source analysis without involving dynamic tracing.
A really interesting point that keeps coming up in discussions about LLMs is “what trade-offs need to be re-evaluated”
> I also believe that observability is up for grabs again. We now have both the need and opportunity to take advantage of it on a whole new level. Most people were not in a position where they could build their own eBPF programs, but LLMs can
One of my big predictions for ‘26 is the industry following through with this line of reasoning. It’s now possible to quickly code up OSS projects of much higher utility and depth.
LLMs are already great at Unix tools; a small api and codebase that does something interesting.
I think we’ll see an explosion of small tools (and Skills wrapping their use) for more sophisticated roles like DevOps, and meta-Skills for how to build your own skill bundles for your internal systems and architecture.
And perhaps more ambitiously, I think services like Datadog will need to change their APIs or risk being disrupted; in the short term nobody is going to be able to move fast enough inside a walled garden to keep up with the velocity the Claude + Unix tools will provide.
UI tooling is nice, but it’s not optimized for agents.
> I also believe that observability is up for grabs again. We now have both the need and opportunity to take advantage of it on a whole new level. Most people were not in a position where they could build their own eBPF programs, but LLMs can
One of my big predictions for ‘26 is the industry following through with this line of reasoning. It’s now possible to quickly code up OSS projects of much higher utility and depth.
LLMs are already great at Unix tools; a small api and codebase that does something interesting.
I think we’ll see an explosion of small tools (and Skills wrapping their use) for more sophisticated roles like DevOps, and meta-Skills for how to build your own skill bundles for your internal systems and architecture.
And perhaps more ambitiously, I think services like Datadog will need to change their APIs or risk being disrupted; in the short term nobody is going to be able to move fast enough inside a walled garden to keep up with the velocity the Claude + Unix tools will provide.
UI tooling is nice, but it’s not optimized for agents.
Do you have any example repos of these OSS projects? I'm being reminded of this post every time people keep extolling how "productive" LLMs are:
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Where is the resulting software?
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Where is the resulting software?
>Where is the resulting software?
Everywhere.
Remember Satya Nadella estimating 30% of code at Microsoft was written by AI? That was March. At this point it's ubiquitous—and invisible.
Everywhere.
Remember Satya Nadella estimating 30% of code at Microsoft was written by AI? That was March. At this point it's ubiquitous—and invisible.
Here you go https://ampcode.com/news/social-coding
I don't think using an AI company that relies on selling AI solutions to make money as a unbiased source of info, but what do I know? I'm not a VC investor and skeptical of the rich + elites in general.
Usually the best rule of thumb is to be against anything these people are for.
Usually the best rule of thumb is to be against anything these people are for.
Do you want me to link you directly to the repos and threads on that page, I can if you can't find them.
No, I'm good. I do find it telling they don't list one of the more public LLM adoptions being forced fed to MSFT workers:
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762
Ok, I can see why they wouldn't list a copilot related stuff since that page is just providing a list of public Amp threads, some of which have public repos. Copilot is a different framework so you wouldn't find it on that page. I linked to the Amp threads because you can see both the conversation as well as the repo for those that include one.
"I have seen some people be quite successful with this."
Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds.
EDIT: typo, and yes I see the irony :D
Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds.
EDIT: typo, and yes I see the irony :D
Just be glad that there remains a concrete benefit to not atrophying your mind and deeply understanding your code. For now. In the long run, I suspect the behemoth will become just as capable at debugging and dealing with complexity as humans. At that point, human involvement in the actual code will be pointless, and the only remaining human skill needed will be properly directing the agents – the skill those people are learning right now.
(I don’t relish this future at all, myself, but I’m starting to think it really will happen soon.)
(I don’t relish this future at all, myself, but I’m starting to think it really will happen soon.)
The only future I see is that prompts will become so refined that you give them all the requirements an they write the code for ya. And that prompt language has to be unambiguous and so detailed that you loop around and re-invented a programming language, just this time it wastes tons of water.
> Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds.
You've just described typical run of the mill company that has software. LLMs will make it easier to shoot yourself in the foot, but let's not rewrite history as if stackoverflow coders are not a thing.
You've just described typical run of the mill company that has software. LLMs will make it easier to shoot yourself in the foot, but let's not rewrite history as if stackoverflow coders are not a thing.
Difference: companies are not pushing their employees to use stack overflow. Stack overflow doesn't waste massive amounts of water and energy. Stack overflow does not easily abuse millions of copyrights in a second by scraping without permission.
Another difference: stack overflow tells you you are wrong or tells you and do your own research or to read the manual (which in a high percentage of cases is the right answer). It doesn't tell you that you are right and proceeds to hallucinate some non-existent flags for some command invocation.
This is a problem but it's a known one which both Google and Anthropic seem to be making progress towards solving. I've had a full on argument with Gemini 3 where it turned out I was wrong and it correctly stuck to its guns and wouldn't let me convince it otherwise. It eventually got through to me about the mistake I made and I learned something useful from it. Sonnet and Opus are still a bit too happy to tell you "you're absolutely right" but I've noticed more pushback creeping in in the right places. It's a tough balance to get right, nobody wants to pay for a service that just tells them "no" whenever they want to try something silly or unconventional.
It mostly incorrectly flags your question as a dup.
There have been lots of tools and resources that have promised (and delivered!) increased programming productivity.
Individual results may vary, but it seems credible that thoroughly learning and using an editor like Vim or Emacs could yield a 2x productivity boost. For the most part, this has never really been pushed. If a programmer wanted to use Nano (or Notepad!), some may have found that odd, but nobody really cared. Use whatever editor you like. Even if it means leaving a 2x productivity boost on the table!
Why is it being pushed so hard that AI coding tools in particular must be used?
Individual results may vary, but it seems credible that thoroughly learning and using an editor like Vim or Emacs could yield a 2x productivity boost. For the most part, this has never really been pushed. If a programmer wanted to use Nano (or Notepad!), some may have found that odd, but nobody really cared. Use whatever editor you like. Even if it means leaving a 2x productivity boost on the table!
Why is it being pushed so hard that AI coding tools in particular must be used?
I am not contesting that stackoverflow isn't bad in many regards, but to equate that to massive PRs or code changes done via AI slop is a different level. At worst, you might get a page or two out of stack overflow but still need to stitch it together yourself.
With LLMs you can literally ask it to generate entire libraries without activating a single neuron in your nogging. Those two do NOT compare in the slightest.
With LLMs you can literally ask it to generate entire libraries without activating a single neuron in your nogging. Those two do NOT compare in the slightest.
Sorry, but why would including the prompt in the pull request make any difference? Explain what you DID in the pull request. If you can't summarize it yourself, it means you didn't review it yourself, so why should I have to do it for you?
You're making assumptions, of course you add BOTH.
The point of adding the "prompt", or the discussion with the LLM is learning. You can go back and see what was the exact conversation.
The point of adding the "prompt", or the discussion with the LLM is learning. You can go back and see what was the exact conversation.
Sounds more like just adding a ton of wasted time for the reviewer to read through those discussions. At least summarize it yourself, e.g. "After discovering manpage XYZ, it became clear that the correct usage of this function is fooBar()".
Why would the reviewer need to read through discussions? The description + code should be just fine.
It's like having someone watch a livestream screen recording of you writing the code.
It's nice to have there IF you need to go back and learn something, but hardly a review requirement.
It's like having someone watch a livestream screen recording of you writing the code.
It's nice to have there IF you need to go back and learn something, but hardly a review requirement.
> My biggest unexpected finding: we’re hitting limits of traditional tools for sharing code. The pull request model on GitHub doesn’t carry enough information to review AI generated code properly — I wish I could see the prompts that led to changes. It’s not just GitHub, it’s also git that is lacking.
I find when submitting a complex PR, i tend to do a self review, adding another layer of comments above those that are included in the code. Seems like a nice place to stuff prompts
I find when submitting a complex PR, i tend to do a self review, adding another layer of comments above those that are included in the code. Seems like a nice place to stuff prompts
In case people don't know, the author of the post is the creator of Flask, possibly Python's most popular micro web framework.
I respect Armin's opinions on the state-of-the-art in programming a lot. I'm wondering if he finds that "vibe coding" (or vibe engineering) is particularly pleasant and effective in Rust compared to, say, Python.
I bet it would be probably even nicer. I've been programming DSP in C++ with JUCE. I have a very rusty C++ experience from years ago, but it's getting me through a lot of it, and I feel pretty comfortable. Maybe my ignorance is bliss, and I'm really just putting out bad shit.
The very first thing I did vibe-coding was commit my prompts and AI responses. In Cursor that's extremely easy—just 'export' a chat. I stopped for security concerns but perhaps something like that is the way.
> The pull request model on GitHub doesn’t carry enough information to review AI generated code properly — I wish I could see the prompts that led to changes. It’s not just GitHub, it’s also git that is lacking.
Yes! Who is building this?
Yes! Who is building this?
Create a folder called "prompts". Create a new file for each prompt you make, name the time after timestamp.
Or just append to prompts.txt
Either way, git will make it trivial to see which prompt belongs with which commit: it'll be in the same diff! You can write a pre-commit hook to always include the prompts in every commit, but I have a feeling most Vibe coders always commit with -a anyway
Either way, git will make it trivial to see which prompt belongs with which commit: it'll be in the same diff! You can write a pre-commit hook to always include the prompts in every commit, but I have a feeling most Vibe coders always commit with -a anyway
It's not just that. There's a lot of (maybe useful) info that's lost without the entire session. And even if you include a jsonl of the entire session, just seeing that is not enough. It would be nice to be able to "click" at some point and add notes / edit / re-run from there w/ changes, etc.
Basically we're at a point where the agents kinda caught up to our tooling, and we need better / different UX or paradigms of sharing sessions (including context, choices, etc)
Basically we're at a point where the agents kinda caught up to our tooling, and we need better / different UX or paradigms of sharing sessions (including context, choices, etc)
Got distracted: love the "WebGL metaballs" header and footer on the site.
The part that resonated most for me is the mismatch between agentic coding and our existing social/technical contracts (git, PRs, reviews). We’re generating more code than ever but losing visibility into how it came to be prompts, failures, local agent reviews. That missing context feels like the real bottleneck now not model quality.
> With agentic coding, part of what makes the models work today is knowing the mistakes. If you steer it back to an earlier state, you want the tool to remember what went wrong. There is, for lack of a better word, value in failures. As humans we might also benefit from knowing the paths that did not lead us anywhere, but for machines this is critical information. You notice this when you are trying to compress the conversation history. Discarding the paths that led you astray means that the model will try the same mistakes again.
I've been trying to find the best ways to record and publish my coding agent sessions so I can link to them in commit messages, because increasingly the work I do IS those agent sessions.
Claude Code defaults to expiring those records after 30 days! Here's how to turn that off: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/claude-code-logs/
I share most of my coding agent sessions through copying and pasting my terminal session like this: https://gistpreview.github.io/?9b48fd3f8b99a204ba2180af785c8... - via this tool: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/23/claude-code-for-web-vi...
Recently been building new timeline sharing tools that render the session logs directly - here's my Codex CLI one (showing the transcript from when I built it): https://tools.simonwillison.net/codex-timeline?url=https%3A%...
And my similar tool for Claude Code: https://tools.simonwillison.net/claude-code-timeline?url=htt...
What I really want it first class support for this from the coding agent tools themselves. Give me a "share a link to this session" button!