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philbo

2,493 karmajoined 16 năm trước
https://philbooth.me/blog

Submissions

Man nearly sucked out of window mid-air on Ryanair plane

bbc.co.uk
15 points·by philbo·23 giờ trước·3 comments

Agentic Coding and Mental Models

philbooth.me
2 points·by philbo·tháng trước·0 comments

Top FEMA official said he once teleported to Waffle House

cnn.com
4 points·by philbo·4 tháng trước·0 comments

Can pumping chemicals into the ocean help stop global heating?

theguardian.com
1 points·by philbo·4 tháng trước·1 comments

Show HN: Pawno, multiplayer chess in your terminal

playpawno.com
1 points·by philbo·5 tháng trước·1 comments

KdK part 2: a medical mystery from postwar Germany

nealstephenson.substack.com
2 points·by philbo·6 tháng trước·0 comments

KdK (Kinetik der Kontinua) part 1: Introduction

nealstephenson.substack.com
1 points·by philbo·6 tháng trước·0 comments

The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets

sciencefocus.com
84 points·by philbo·7 tháng trước·107 comments

comments

philbo
·8 ngày trước·discuss
YES!

It's still very wip, I spent a couple of weekends on it so far, but I'm working on a harness that eschews autonomy and instead aims to work as a pair programming partner. Key to that are distinct "driver" and "navigator" modes, with the capacity to flip between them rapidly.

https://gitlab.com/philbooth/opair

(not really usable yet, but after tomorrow's session I expect to be developing opair in opair, which is mildly exciting)
philbo
·12 ngày trước·discuss
1. Write ADRs (or get agents to write them)

2. Commit ADRs to git

3. Mention ADRs in AGENTS.md
philbo
·20 ngày trước·discuss
Yesterday I started working on an agent harness that tries to address some of the issues here.

What I'm hoping to build ultimately is something that works more like a pair-programming partner than existing harnesses do. I want the user to be an engaged part of the development process all the way through, I don't want the agent disappearing to work on its own. I even want to make it possible for users to swap into the driver role and have the LLM automatically assume the role of navigator when that happens.

There's more info in the readme (actually the readme is all that exists so far, I wanted to get the idea straight in my head first):

https://gitlab.com/philbooth/opair

Even if nobody else uses it, I hope it will be a useful tool for myself and help me find a way to work with LLMs that doesn't harm my mental models, which is what I feel current harnesses do.
philbo
·24 ngày trước·discuss
If a coworker dumped a 5k-line code review on you, you'd tell them to come back when it's broken down into smaller, reviewable chunks. Large dumps of code are basically unreviewable by humans, but it seems like a lot of people have forgotten about that when it comes to LLMs.
philbo
·27 ngày trước·discuss
https://app.bluefriday.uk/

The nichest of niche social network clients. It's for people in one particular country, who watch one particular TV program, on one particular day of the week.

Now that the cost of writing software is zero, I love that my focus have moved from vain attempts to generate passive income to just building whatever random shit I feel like. Wish I'd made that choice earlier in life, but no worries!
philbo
·28 ngày trước·discuss
For decades, engineers understood that large code reviews are harder than small ones. Out of both politeness and a desire to receive better code reviews, we learned to break our large changes into smaller chunks. Some engineers took things even further and replaced code reviews with pair programming. But then LLMs showed up and everyone seems to have forgotten those lessons.

They can be still be applied now using coding agents, if you're willing to push back against the default setup and change your mode of thinking a little bit. Of course it doesn't help that an entire industry is dedicated to persuading us that maximizing token spend is the only way to get shit done.

I appreciate this probably seems like an extremist take, but I wrote some more about it here in case there's anybody out there who identifies with it:

https://philbooth.me/blog/agentic-coding-and-mental-models
philbo
·5 tháng trước·discuss
I began this project as an exercise to learn Go before starting a new job, then continued it as an exercise to mess about with Claude Code. So development was LLM-assisted: the UI is 100% vibe-coded, the model is 100% vim-typed, the rest is a mix of both.

Online play does not require signup etc. Instead I create an ephemeral session when network games are created/joined and those sessions are deleted at the end of the game. Leaderboard state is entirely local.

Because the backend runs on a small instance, I've been quite aggressive with connection management. If the server goes a minute without hearing from a client (turn or heartbeat), it ends the game and awards the win to the opposing player.

It was a pretty fun project to work on, and I definitely wouldn't have finished it without the crutch of Claude Code to push me through some of the schlepp.
philbo
·6 tháng trước·discuss
https://philbooth.me/
philbo
·6 tháng trước·discuss
Russia was allowed to inherit the USSR seat on 3 conditions:

- It took on all the sovereign debt from the newly independent nations.

- It relinquished nukes that were left behind in Ukraine.

- The United Nations collectively agreed to it.

I don't think any of those things would happen in the UK's case. But of course it doesn't matter what you or I think. It only matters what _Iran_ thinks will happen if Scotland gains independence.
philbo
·6 tháng trước·discuss
It's for the Scottish. It's in Iran's interests for Scotland to become independent because that would enforce change on the United Nations Security Council. The UK ceases to exist and loses its veto, then what happens on the UNSC after that is anyone's guess.
philbo
·8 tháng trước·discuss
https://status.posthog.com/history
philbo
·9 tháng trước·discuss
A nice thing about the SAX approach is it lets you layer other APIs on top too. I did something like that in BFJ:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/bfj
philbo
·9 tháng trước·discuss
It sounds like there’s another failure here, which you could have documented. If the test team didn’t understand what they were meant to test, that’s a failure of communication. Simply saying “they were wrong” is not sufficient exploration of the failure so, if that’s the point your manager was making, I agree with them. Blaming a third party for misunderstanding is less useful than seeking to improve the clarity of your own communication.
philbo
·9 tháng trước·discuss
I think this and other recent posts here hugely overcomplicate matters. I notice none of them provides an A/B test for each item of complexity they introduce, there's just a handwavy "this has proved to work over time".

I've found that a single CLAUDE.md does really well at guiding it how I want it to behave. For me that's making it take small steps and stop to ask me questions frequently, so it's more like we're pairing than I'm sending it off solo to work on a task. I'm sure that's not to everyone's taste but it works for me (and I say this as someone who was an agent-sceptic until quite recently).

Fwiw my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md is 2.2K / 49 lines.
philbo
·9 tháng trước·discuss
Does he though? Honestly I haven't seen it.

I've been through the last ~10 or ~15 posts on his Medium this evening, to check. Sentence-by-sentence I don't see anything that goes beyond "what if". Can you share some of the quotes you have in mind?

I think this is an interesting phenomenon, because it seems that lots of people throw personal insults at him (not saying that's you btw) without addressing the meat of whatever they're reacting to.

And lest we forget! One of the founding essays [1] of this very website discusses it: if you're slinging ad hominem attacks or personal insults around, you're by definition losing the "argument" (not that I think this qualifies as an "argument").

[1]: https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
philbo
·9 tháng trước·discuss
Every confirmation is a data point.
philbo
·9 tháng trước·discuss
I think 3I/Atlas is a comet.

But I also think the question "what if it wasn't" is useful to consider.

I'd label anyone unwilling to discuss that topic a crank, not the other way round.
philbo
·9 tháng trước·discuss
Not much, but just confirmation that it's in the expected part of the sky is quite exciting. There's a probable capture of it from Perseverance here (it's just a tiny faint smudge):

https://bsky.app/profile/stim3on.bsky.social/post/3m2aqnbwlw...
philbo
·9 năm trước·discuss
As a JS programmer with some Clojure experience I can confirm that the JVM is absolutely the biggest turn-off for me personally. Lisp syntax, immutable data structures, laziness, all splendid. The build/runtime environment, not so much.

Sounds like I should revisit CLJS based on your comment.