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• Post #3293341

  After trying rubyfmt I think it’s finally time for us to autoformat our Ruby code and leave most* style debates behind. It ran incredibly fast (very small number of seconds) on our ancient monolith’s full codebase. I’m rather proud that we stumbled over 2 bugs due to some exotic formatting choices (reported and fixed in a jiffy). * It doesn’t enforce any one multiline block style 🙈 https://stripe.dev/blog/formatting-an-entire-25-million-line-codebase-overnight-the-rubyfmt-story

• Post #3293340

  YOLO vibe coding gets a lot of attention, but AI is so good for helping you sweat the details, too. It's a choice. I fixed something I've been bothered by, involving not-super-fun MJML templates and email CSS. It took hours to produce a small change because I was thinking and expressing intent throughout. Did things like having AI make tables of the whitespace rhythm, to dial it in. I barely wrote any code directly, but I thoroughly considered the end result, and considered t...

• Post #3293339

  This might be slightly crazy, but today I tried having Claudes amend unpushed commits as savepoints, as a poor man's worktree, letting me work closer to the speed of thought. Instead of blocking on making change B because Claude is still churning away at change A, I instruct the A Claude to commit it with some given message. And I do the same for B. Then if I make further changes for A, I have it amend that commit. If I want to change the commit message, I tell it what to change it to.

• Post #3293338

  Is there an established word for what I think of as edge-case-itis? It’s when a common flow in some app is more complicated than it needs to be because the devs/designers presumably over-focus on edge cases. Or more generously, value edge-case consistency over common-case simplicity. The one I see all the time is when most people have one of something (e.g. a cat flap) but the app has you navigate via a list-of-one every time to get at it.

• Post #3293337

  Our Criterion Closet Movie Club at work continues. This week’s short is ”Hotel Monterey” (1973) which I saw described somewhere as *maybe* more fun than watching paint dry. A true tour-de-force-myself-to-watch. Quite like what I’ve seen of the main movie so far, though! ”Cléo from 5 to 7” (1962). https://letterboxd.com/film/cleo-from-5-to-7/ I like having some social pressure to watch stuff I otherwise wouldn’t. Some is for me and the rest (*cough* Cassavetes *cough*) is at least fun to discu...

• Post #3293336

  Spent some time today reviewing a high-vibe PR for our ancient monolith. Reminded me that code as communication over time is really important in a long-lived project. Both for humans and, I suspect, AI. Via the right abstractions, the right DRY or duplication, commit messages that capture the "why" and not just the "what". Even before AI, many tasks were much easier if you disregarded all those things and just patched on some more code, and did not stop to...