- I have an out-there hypothesis I’d want to test. Much of the population has one or more MTHFR mutations, which can increase homocysteine if left untreated and that’s been linked to increased risk in stroke. Treatment includes more B vitamins. I wonder if the declining nutrition in foods and lack of B vitamins has anything to do with this.
- Interesting to see all the people in this thread who had a stroke. I had a mild and then moderate cerebellar stroke within a 7 day span about two years ago. I remember being on the stroke neurology floor of the hospital with a lot of bed ridden people who had also suffered them. I know because, within 24 hours, I was doing hourly walking laps with my nurses because I was bored. In other words, I was one of the lucky ones. Within a week I was back at work — not because I felt pressured to by them, they were completely understanding, but because I had no more symptoms that were experienced simply because I was sitting down to work.
I also see some advice about listening to your body after the fact, which I fully agree with. In my case, without going into too much detail, the stroke might not have happened if I had listened to my body beforehand, as it was caused by an injury I could have prevented.
So if I could give any advice from this place of experience it would be to listen to your body, and try to hear it when your fears and ego are shouting.
- Lol this person talks about easing into LLMs again two weeks after quitting cold turkey. The addiction is real. I laugh because I’m in the same situation, and see no way out other than to switch professions and/or take up programming as a hobby in which I purposefully subject myself to hard mode. I’m too productive with it in my profession to scale back and do things by hand — the cat is out of the bag and I’ve set a race pace at work that I can’t reasonably retract from without raising eyebrows. So I agree with the author’s referenced post that finding ways to still utilize it while maintaining a mental map of the code base and limiting its blast radius is a good middle ground, but damn it requires a lot of discipline.
- > ChatGPT and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
Replace ChatGPT with ‘knives’ or ‘nuclear technology’ and you will see this is blaming the tool and not the humans weilding them. You won’t win the fight against technological advancements. We need to hold the humans that use them accountable
- In my experience limiting myself to two projects in parallel is most productive, with a clear primary project whose agent’s completion take precedence over the other’s. It lets me still have concurrent work going on, but I’m very clearly still taking care to be precise and targeted with my prompting. Too many things going on, and I’m no longer optimizing for doing the task but for having as much parallel execution and progress as possible, and that’s a trap of perceived productivity.
- > You must carefully not leaving any recursive functions not annotated with #[recursive]
Isn’t the same true of forgetting #[stacksafe]?
This reminds me of certain Haskell patterns where you selectively make some operations strict instead of lazy for similar reasons. I’m glad this library exists, but I’m sad the Rust compiler itself doesn’t have better support for recursion.
- If you have trouble in bed, ask yourself if you use Listerine. It kills your mouth’s microbiome and lowers your Nitric Oxide production [0].
- The author got too big for their britches and was drunk on perceived power. No need to have many parallel agents going on. Focus on one project and implementing features one at a time and dogfooding and testing. Shipping any code, vibed or not, then saying it blew up is not the LLMs fault. I can’t believe I’m saying that. It’s the shipper’s responsibility to make sure it works. Of course if you are a manager and let your junior ship code it will blow up…
And yes I know AI is marketed as more. But it’s still people’s fault for swallowing the PR and shipping crappy code then complaining about the lies. Stop deflecting responsibility for your work
- Lots of in-depth analysis, but I think the author is very clearly emotionally invested to the point that they are only drawing conclusions that justify and support their emotions. I agree that we’re in a bubble in the sense that a lot of these companies will go bankrupt, but it won’t be Google or Anthropic (unless Google makes a model that’s an order of magnitude better or order of magnitude cheaper with capability parity). Claude is simply too good at coding in well-represented languages like Python and Typescript to not pay hundreds of dollars a month for (if not thousands, subsidized by employers). These companies are racing to have the most effective agents and models right now. Once the bottleneck is clearly humans’ ability the specify the requirements and context, reducing the cost of the models will be the main competitive edge, and we’re not there yet (although even now the better you are at providing requirements and context, the more effective you are with the models). I think that once cost reduction is the target, Google will win because they have the hardware capabilities to do so.
- Mean time to shipping features of various estimated difficulty. It’s subjective and not perfect, but generally speaking I need to work way less. I’ll be honest, one thing I think I could have done faster without AI was to implement CRDT-based cloud sync for a project I have going. I think I’ve tried to utilize AI too much for this. It’s good at implementing vector clock implementations, but not at preventing race conditions.
- The auditing is not quick. I prefer cursor to claude code because I can review its changes while it’s going more easily and stop and redirect it if it starts to veer off course (which is often, but the cost of doing business). Over time I still gain an understanding of the codebase that I can use to inform my prompts or redirection, so it’s not like I’m blindly asking it to do things. Yes, I do ask it to write unit tests a lot of the time. But I don’t have it spin off and just iterate until the unit tests pass — that’s a recipe for it to do what it needs to do to pass them and is counterproductive. I plan what I want the set of tests to look like and have them write functions in isolation without mentioning tests, and if tests fail I go through a process of auditing the failing code and then the tests themselves to make sure nothing was missed. It’s exactly how I would treat a coworkers code that I review. My prompts range from a few sentences to a few paragraphs, and nowadays I construct a large .md file with a checklist that we iterate on for larger refactors and projects to manage context
- I did read the entire article before commenting and acknowledge that you are using them to some affect, but the line about 50% of the time it works 50% of the time is where I lost faith in the claims you’re making. I agree it’s very context dependent but, in the same way, you did not outline your approaches and practices in how you use AI in your workflow. The same lack of context exists on the other side of the argument.
- I have to say I’m in the exact camp the author is complaining about. I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products which I started back when it was only ChatGPT and it was shitty. I started using Claude with copying and pasting back and forth between the web chat and XCode. Then I discovered Cursor. It left me with a lot of annoying build errors, but my productivity was still at least 3x. Now that agents are better and claude 4 is out, I barely ever write code, and I don’t mind. I’ve leaned into the Architect/Manager role and direct the agent with my specialized knowledge if I need to.
I started a job at a demanding startup and it’s been several months and I have still not written a single line of code by hand. I audit everything myself before making PRs and test rigorously, but Cursor + Sonnet is just insane with their codebase. I’m convinced I’m their most productive employee and that’s not by measuring lines of code, which don’t matter; people who are experts in the codebase ask me for help with niche bugs I can narrow in on in 5-30 minutes as someone whose fresh to their domain. I had to lay off taking work away from the front end dev (which I’ve avoided my whole career) because I was stepping on his toes, fixing little problems as I saw them thanks to Claude. It’s not vibe coding - there’s a process of research and planning and perusing in careful steps, and I set the agent up for success. Domain knowledge is necessary. But I’m just so floored how anyone could not be extracting the same utility from it. It feels like there’s two articles like this every week now.
this might be one of the most sociopathic things I’ve ever read