Information Scientist, Web Dev, Pattern Enjoyer ✴️ 🔬 🧬 🌐
Austin, TX 🌵
Joined February 2019
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This is beautiful
Remembering the night I got fixated on paper data storage and learned you can fit about 140 pages of (encoded) plaintext on a single sheet of paper. The page below includes the encoder legend and its source code repeated 26 times
It's illegible at a glance and breaks when photographed or shared on social media, but is totally reconstructable without guidance if printed, scanned, and handed to an LLM for decoding
Do with that what you will!
Gabriel 🧱 🚧 🌐 retweeted
One underrated aspect of coding with AI is that I never get stuck anymore.
In the olden days I'd sometimes hit a bug or other difficulty that could leave me spinning my wheels for days. I'd google fifty variations of the same query, read poorly-written docs I barely understood, post on StackOverflow and get no answer, pore through obscure technical blogs and bang my head against the screen but end up no closer to victory than when I started. Sometimes I'd give up completely.
This basically never happens anymore. AI doesn't magically solve everything but it cuts through all the crap so I quickly that I never feel like I'm making no progress.
Kids these days don't know how good they've got it!
LLMs make it so easy to get up and running with Linux and to adapt it to my needs.
The learning curve and time commitment of switching over has always prevented me from doing it.
It is now possible (for better or worse) to vibe code your personal OS in a few days.
Gabriel 🧱 🚧 🌐 retweeted
i guess what i've been trying to say is...
reality is made of wholes nested inside larger wholes: cells → bodies → groups → cities → nations → civilization → planet → stars
0. sunlight is the only new energy in the stack - it flows up through every level and leaves as waste heat.
1. too much control from above and the system becomes authoritarian.
2. too much independence from below and it fragments.
3. healthy systems find the middle: each part retains agency while contributing to the larger whole.
Gabriel 🧱 🚧 🌐 retweeted
Everything interesting that was hard about software engineering is still hard and interesting.
The limiting factor of *everything* is engaging with complexity.
Pattern Language (à la Christopher Alexander) is the highest potential technology we have of practically and manageably working with complexity, in consciousness, across scale, and in context.
That moment when the spine underneath all the load-bearing table stakes has a through-line that's doing real work.
Even clean code is gone with the wind
I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests.
