- ewoodrichI've been able to do WiFi-WiFi connection sharing on my last four Samsung phones as well
- I bookmarked to take a closer look later, but I'm a little unclear on the premise, could you explain what you mean by "slow"/how it is filtered/curated?
- I mean, we typically architect systems depending on humans around an assumption of human fallibility. But when it comes to automation, randomly still doing the exact opposite even if somewhat rare is problematic and limits where and at what scale it can be safely deployed without needing ongoing human supervision.
For a coding tool it’s not as problematic as hopefully you vet the output to some degree but it still means I have don’t feel comfortable using them using them as expansively (like the mythical personal assistant doing my banking and replying to emails, etc) as they might otherwise be used with more predictable failure modes.
I’m perfectly comfortable with Waymo on the other hand, but that would probably change if I knew they were driven by even the newest and fanciest LLMs as [toddler identified | action: avoid toddler] -> turns towards toddler is a fundamentally different sort of problem.
- I've gone down that route already with Roo/Kilo Code and then OpenCode, but OpenCode with the z.ai backend and/or the CC z.ai Anthropic compatible endpoint although I've been moving to OC in general more and more over time.
GLM 4.6 with Z.ai plan (haven't tried 4.7 yet) has worked well enough for straightforward changes with a relatively large quota (more generous than CC which only gets more frustrating on the Pro plan over time) and has predictable billing which is a big pro for me. I just got tired of having to police my OpenRouter usage to avoid burning through my credits.
But yes, OpenCode is awesome particularly as it supports all the subscriptions I have access to via personal or work (Github Copilot/CC/z.ai). And as model churn/competition slows down over time I can stick which whichever end up having the best value/performance with sufficient quota for my personal projects without fear of lock-in and enshittification.
- It's a perfectly serviceable fallback when Claude Code kicks me off in the middle of an edit on the Pro plan (which happens constantly to me now) and I just want to finish tweaking some CSS styles or whatever to wrap up. If you have a legitimate concern about losing customers than yes, you're probably in the wrong target market for a $3/mo plan...
- Not OP, and haven't had it flat out rm the entire .git, but I have had Claude get flustered and pull a "Wait, no! what was I thinking? that idea doesn't work at all here, I need to revert that attempt and try something else..."
.. and then ran a fatally flawed "git checkout" command that wiped out all unstaged changes, which it immediately realized and after flailing around for five minutes trying to undo eventually came back saying "yeah uh so sorry, but... here's the thing..."
- I recently ran into two baffling, what felt like GPT 3.5 era completely backwards misinterpretations of an unambiguous sentence once each in Codex and CC/Sonnet a few days apart in completely different scenarios (both very early in the context window). And to be fair, they were notable partially as an "exception that proves the rule" where it was surprising to see but OP's example can definitely still happen in my experience.
I was prepared to go back to my original message and spot an obvious-in-hindsight grey area/phrasing issue on my part as the root cause but there was nothing in the request itself that was unclear or problematic, nor was it buried deep within a laundry list of individual requests in a single message. Of course, the CLI agents did all sorts of scanning through the codebase/self debate/etc in between the request and the first code output. I'm used to how modern models/agents get tripped up by now so this was an unusually clear cut failure to encounter from the latest large commercial reasoning models.
In both instances, literally just restating the exact same request with "No, the request was: [original wording]" was all it took to steer them back and didn't become a concerning pattern. But with the unpredictability of how the CLI agents decide to traverse a repo and ingest large amounts of distracting code/docs it seems much too over confident to believe that random, bizarre LLM "reasoning" failures won't still occur from time to time in regular usage even as models improve given their inherent limitations.
(If I were bending over backwards to be charitable/anthropomorphize, it would be the human failure mode of "I understood exactly what I was asked for and what I needed to do, but then somehow did the exact opposite, haha oops brain fart!" but personally I'm not willing to extend that much forgiveness/tolerance to a failure from a commercial tool I pay for...)
- In the US for the past 5+ years Xfinity/Comcast, Charter, and whatever CenturyLink is called these days have all heavily pushed the "self-install kit" option vs traditional tech install each time I've moved.
Worked 4/5 times (all with cable), only time it failed was because I had apparently subscribed to a DSL plan from CenturyLink without realizing and they needed to wire up the extra lines upstream for the "modern" version of DSL to work in my apartment. After insisting multiple times that the self-install kit was 100% plug-n-play at my new address despite my intense skepticism since I really needed reliable internet from Day 1 during COVID remote work.
I was seriously missing Comcast/cable by the time that 1 yr contract was up, the devil you know and all...
- If you decide to dual boot:
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
I run this as the first step on any new Win 11 machine, the recommended defaults remove nearly all annoyances I care about. It's a popular tool that's been around for years with a lot of users so isn't some random repo, and it's just Powershell so pretty easy to understand what it's doing if you want to audit the code yourself.
After running it once, I've seen nothing that I would consider an "ad" on Windows 11, and search looks only at the filesystem without any web/store trash. Somewhat ironically, it makes for a cleaner experience than MacOS where I regularly get spammed by Apple trying to cross-sell me something (iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, etc).
(FWIW, I have also never needed to re-run after an update or anything, based on 6+ full Win11 installs across three different devices.)
- Nice, that makes sense. I'm always curious when I hear about other giant Excel monoliths still in use if they're truly a huge tangled web of formulas, or more like a VB6 program stapled to some worksheets that can be distributed as a single .xlsm file like ours.
You're definitely right that 99% of Excel users have no idea that an entire IDE is lurking in the background with Alt-F11 and wouldn't even know where to begin to do a simple fix/tweak. Whereas even a complex formula can at least be mentally parsed as a math equation with some strange ALLCAPS() names scattered throughout, or copy/pasted into Google/an LLM to get started, so much more discoverable than VBA.
Not to mention that the VBA IDE is a horrible dev experience in pretty much every way and frozen in time while regular Excel is actively maintained.
I've explored pulling out all the critical business logic currently in VBA and having Claude Code rewrite to VB.NET that can be called from Excel to gradually phase out VBA for maintainability. But unfortunately despite VBA essentially driving everything, it's tightly coupled to the Excel spreadsheet data model. So I'd have to use a .NET library to emulate the Excel worksheet functions, or pretty much do a full rewrite to use modern .NET methods for the in-memory data manipulation stuff.
Without good visibility into the Excel side of the VBA, Claude Code/Gemini CLI were just flailing so I abandoned that idea for now until I can find a solid conversion path.
- Any VBA? I help out with an extremely complex 15+ yr old Excel workbook designed for managing school debate tournaments that's still in active use in the PNW debate world but the complexity is 90% from VBA.
It does inject Excel formulas when creating worksheets but also heavily uses UI controls/dialogs made with the VB6 era WYSIWYG designer built into Excel, plus some COM extensions for SMTP emails, with spreadsheets used both as a pseudo database mostly hidden from the user and as the output for rendering data but the actual logic is mostly VBA.
Excel's VBA IDE feels like a time capsule from 2002, and not in a good way (with some of the most comically unhelpful error messages I've ever seen and extremely aggressive syntax checking that constantly interrupts typing in code). Microsoft increasingly makes it very clear they don't want people using VBA but it still works fine in the latest PC versions from O365 after turning off a few security features/approving some prompts.
- My company (and others in the same sector) depends on certain proprietary enterprise software that has literally no publicly available API documentation online, anywhere.
There is barely anything that qualifies as documentation that they are willing to provide under NDA for lock-in reasons/laziness (ERPish sort of thing narrowly designed for the specific sector, and more or less in a duopoly).
The difficulty in developing solutions is 95% understanding business processes/requirements. I suspect this kind of thing becomes more common the further you get from a "software company” into specific industry niches.
- Aurora Store is a nearly perfect 1:1 replacement for the Play Store. I just wish they had slightly more clear error messages when downloads don't work (but typically just means the Play Store wouldn't have shown as available for the device for whatever reason).
- Yeah, I've been using Claude and Codex to create bespoke systemd services for my random tools and automation stuff and have been really impressed by how easy it is and how rock solid they are once setup. It's really nice not living in constant terror that a reboot, network connectivity loss or gentle breeze will cause my duct taped scripts to collapse under their own weight.
- Yeah my parents never really cared enough to explore ChatGPT despite hearing about it 10 times a day in news/media for the last few years. But recently my mom started using Google's AI Search mode after first trying it while doing research for house hunting and my dad uses the Gemini app for occasional questions/identifying parts and stuff (he has always loved Google Lens so those sort of interactive multimedia features are the main pull vs plain text chatbot conversations).
They are both Android/Google Search users so all it really took was "sure I guess I'll try that" in response to a nudge from Google. For me personally I have subscriptions to Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini for coding but use Gemini for 90% of chatbot questions. Eventually I'll cancel some of them but will probably keep Gemini regardless because I like having the extra storage with my Google One plan bundle. Google having a pre-existing platform/ecosystem is a huge advantage imo.
- Gemini CLI via a Google One plan is the regular consumer billing flow which is pretty straightforward.
- Sure, you can always remove it, but an average person posting AI images on Facebook or whatever probably won't bother. I was skeptical of Google's SynthID when I first heard about it but I've been seeing it used to identify suspected AI images on Reddit recently (the example I saw today was cropped and lightly edited with a filter but still got flagged correctly) and it's cool to have a hard data point when present. It won't help with bad/manipulative actors but a decent mitigation for the low effort slop scenario since it can survive the kind of basic editing a regular person knows how to do on their phone and typical compression when uploading/serving.
- I also get confused when I see it taken for granted that "vibe coding" removes all the drudgery/chores from programming. When my own experience heavily using Claude Code/etc every day routinely involves a lot of unpleasant clean up of accumulated LLM slop and "WTF" decisions.
I still think it saves me time on net and yes, it typically can handle a lot on its own, but whenever it starts to fuck up the same request repeatedly in different ways, all I can really do is sigh/roll my eyes and then it's on me alone to dig in and figure it out/fix it to keep making progress.
And usually that consists of incredibly ungratifying, unpleasant work I'm very much not happy to be doing.
I definitely have been able to do more side projects for ideas that pop into my head thanks to CC and similar, and that part is super cool! But other times I hit a wall where a project suddenly goes from breezy and fun to me spending hours reading through diffs/chat history trying to untangle a pile of garbage code I barely understand 10% of and have to remind myself I was supposed to be doing this for "fun"/learning, and accomplishing neither while not getting paid for it.