The thing you have to remember is in those days: a) autosave was not a thing, and b) crashing meant *the whole system*, so it’s reasonable that people lost significant amounts of work. (At least it was past the point where an improper shutdown could f-up your hard drive. I think.)

Deskilling as a byproduct of using AI should come as absolutely no surprise, as it’s the equivalent of going into management (i.e. having humans write the code for you). A massive chunk of my peers from when I started are very senior managers and unless they kept sharp on personal…

I feel like I need a T-shirt that reads, "No, I am not interested in adopting your f**king Claude skill." AI is definitely helping a thousand flowers bloom, but I am starting to feel buried under petals. I'll just figure it out myself. I am not going to clone your repo, attach your marketplace...

Someone remarked it’s hard to remember how bad people thought Reagan was (and he was!). But this was parody. Now it seems like reality.

I mean, you don't really need a translator

Everything else aside, my grandfather was a Methodist minister and I always thought the Methodists did church design well.

As a Gen Xer, when I called my 7 year old over to watch Artemis II take off, I did briefly consider the possibility that I was going to have to have THAT conversation with her and really hoped I didn't have to... Thankfully didn't.

This really feels like January 2020, with everything going on like normal as the storm clouds gather quickly and everybody acting like they aren’t going to get caught in the deluge.

As a writer, the worst thing about Rowling was her inability to constrain herself, something that got worse and worse as the books become more and more popular and she could clearly just ignore editors. The fact this is a miniseries not a movie just plays up that weakness so….

The problem is that building a UI framework, especially for something as old and large as Windows, is a generational project but most people ship v1.0, get their promotion, and then move on.

If ever completed, Graham Street would be the station closest to me but I’m not surprised and kinda doubt it will ever happen.

Honestly, consumer is so deeply not in Microsoft's DNA it's not even funny. And assistants in particular are Microsoft's Kryptonite, going all the way back to the misbegotten Microsoft Bob and Clippy (and his ilk).

something that's very hard for today's kids to understand: * there were only a few major brands of chewing gum * everyone knew all of them * each had its own banging anthem, whose words we still know * every one of these brands of gum fucks, to this day

It occured to me this morning that perhaps one reason why senior coders are taking to Claude more than junior coders is because it paradoxically takes them back to the simpler days when they were first learning to code. To wit: when the most senior coders were first cutting their teeth... 1/

"Is it Tuesday? It must be time for another Windows GUI framework." Every generation at MSFT thinks that *it* is the one that will finally create the one framework to rule them all. (Props to the ChatGPT diagram... I never did get to use "Avelon/WFF" or "Blacor Hybrid"...)

As I work with Claude, I increasingly realize how many things there are out there that I have thought about doing but which were just too frickin' tedious to bother with. Now that I can throw an instance at it, it's soon going to be the equivalent of the unread pile of books on the bedside table.

Man, I have been in SO MANY corporate meetings where someone got caught up short on a question they clearly did not have a good answer for and they tried to vamp their way through it. It's always completely obvious and it never works. Nobody is ever fooled.

My wife complains about the Temuization of nice clothing brands that she used to buy, how formerly luxe brands now all feel cheap and flimsy. As I start to get more and more documents at work obviously generated by ChatGPT and ilk, I can sympathize.

I feel like all the people who are like "...but the agents will handle the QA and bug fixing too!" have never called a large corporation's help line and gotten an LLM on the other end and experienced just how helpful they can be...

This will make filling out taxes easier! “Grok, I forgot what my SSN is, can you remind me? How about my wife and children’s’?”

I'll admit that, until now, I never understood what the Scroll Lock key was intended to do (nor do I believe I ever used it for any purpose whatsoever).

I, too, find the Slack AI bot to be shockingly helpful. My general mental model is that "ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude = helpful, vendor specific AI (looking at you MSFT) = completely useless" and it was a pleasant surprise.

This reminds me of my meeting with a prospective lawyer as my first marriage fell apart and me asking him how 50/50 custody works and him being kind of shocked I'd even be interested in that sort of thing and him explaining how most men wanted to be able to, like, move out of state.

If only life were like Skyrim where you could finish all the side quests first and then find yourself ridiculously overpowered when you finally get around to finishing the main quest line.

In my experience, this is the dividing line between folks who are superstars and everyone else. Every superstar developer who I'd trust with my life is incredibly good at thinking through a problem before their hands ever touch a keyboard. The code has always been almost an afterthought. Which is...

You can watch the id and ego (there is no superego) of the administration battle it out in real time.

Tesla is a meme stock with car dealerships.

“He can’t magically access my bank account just because he has email access.” Are you *sure*? There isn’t a stray email that references your bank name and account number? Maybe a random attachment you forgot has your SSN in it? The inevitable “OpenClaw helpfully reset my bank password…” awaits.

In pondering this, I came to the realization that a lot of my career has involved coming in to some mature impossible-to-distingish-from-vibe-coding codebase and trying to whip it into some semblance of shape. My time has come!

My experience is similar. Typically deciding what to do (i.e. design) is the most mentally taxing part of engineering, but you'd get a pause between design problems because you'd have to spend time coding. With that short circuited, it's just the hard thing, over and over and over.

Giving a shit can be a real liability when working with LLMs.

A corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced software system is indistinguishable from vibe-coding." That's... actually shockingly true.

This is a very impressive achievement but, in fairness, a C compiler is like the "Hello, world!" of compilers. A half century old language that is extremely compact and straightforward with an extremely simple type system. As the foundation of the most important pieces of software in the world...

The thing is, whether Apple is on the “stupid” list or not, probably three of the others will definitely be there regardless.

Even if you believe that measles is no big deal, I just don't understand not having the impulse to help spare your child suffering. My oldest kids just missed the introduction of the rotovirus vaccine and got it. It was awful, but they survived just fine. I would have been happy to have spared them.

One of the critical things that distinguishes a senior developer from a junior developer is an understanding, deep in their bones, that the cost of DOING a thing is cheap compared to the cost of truly FINISHING a thing and utterly trivial compared to the cost of MAINTAINING a thing. Like 1:10:10000.

A truly unexpected side effect of the Epstein Files release is getting a window into what was really going on in the upper reaches of the Microsoft org chart during the Windows 8 timeframe. Absolutely not on my bingo card.

It reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) words of David Lee Roth: “Money may not buy happiness but it’ll buy a big enough boat to sail right up next to it!”

I don't believe for a nanosecond that Anthropic won't start running ads when the time comes (c.f. "don't be evil"), but well played for the moment.

I guess Bezos forgot a semicolon back then: Democracy dies; in darkness.

What the hey? How did the nice Seattle Scandinavians get pulled into this crap? Watch this Almost Live skit from way back to see what Scandinavians contributed to Seattle. Uff da!

I'm having a real problem with Claude Code. I've got too many f**king ideas and I can't stop creating new git worktrees. I'm really worried about where this is all headed.

In a meeting, it finally hit me that coding agents are just machine equivalents of Leonard from Memento. Every time you wake them up, they have no idea what's going on and have to read all the post-it notes and tattoos to catch themselves up.

What is starting to come into focus is that agents like Claude are like a true genie in a bottle: incredibly powerful but you really have to ask for the right things in the right way or you’re going to find that getting what you think you want is going to be an unpleasant experience.

This picture just...

My daughter is just slightly older and has the "Pikachu" version of that hat. You squeeze the white balls hanging down and the ears flip up. She's got a cubby like his. I can't imagine if I didn't know where she was for 24 hours only to find she's in some detention center halfway across the country.

I think one of the subtler reasons senior developers are so excited about agents is the prospect of a coworker with absolutely no ego to bruise. I’d feel bad telling someone who worked for a week on something, “No, that’s not what I wanted, throw it out and start again.” No such problem with agents.

I have to say, of all the unintended consequences of giving Obama the Nobel Peace Price, this is the most unintended one of them all... I hope?

It's AOL Monday all over again.

Really hope Hegseth's up first. And it's live.