lucky-commit is a hilarious project that required knowing some nitty gritty details about some of the concepts underpinning git still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks/223

Drop your RSS feeds in the replies so people (including me) can find them 👇

"Plan to throw one away" but for your first LLM prompt. See what the LLM does with your first prompt, where it went off track, what was underspecified, what other bit of context you wish you had included. Then rewrite your improved, higher-context prompt and pass it to an even better model.

🎱 Strong week of league pool for me — I handedly won my Masters match, I swept both of my 8-ball matches, and after a slow start in 9-ball I ended up running away with that match too. Lots to work on still, specific shots to focus some practice time on.

it’s a really good model

Currently self-reviewing (and commenting on) my own 3,400 line PR 🫠 I loathe letting PRs get this big. I try to do incremental delivery of atomic pieces as much as possible, but I really don't think there was a way around it in this case.

I'm giving Anthropic's `/code-review` plugin for Claude Code a try. It clearly gonna burn through some usage, but very intrigued to see what results it comes up with for a large PR I just finished. github.com/anthropics/c...

What's your favorite seed value to use when running tests?

this fred again set is wayyyy too good www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0-h...

I don't really do New Year resolutions, but one *intention* I'm experimenting with this year is: to listen to much more human-curated music and to drastically reduce listening to algorithmically-recommended music.

What's the case for using Claude Code within VS Code rather than directly from a standalone terminal? I've seen both @johnlindquist.com and @mattpocock.com do this in some of their videos, but I don't have the intuition for why there instead of from a dedicated terminal.

League night 🎱 (8-ball) First round of session playoffs tonight. Per usual, it is a nail biter. I swept my match 5-0 and we’re looking to see how the next match or two goes 🤞

mango la croix for life, but topo chico is great

The website revamp for @thelotradio.com is incredible. Nice work!! 🎶🎧 www.thelotradio.com

a more prosaic challenge for 2026 is to use LLMs to help you write less rather than more

I added a rule to Cursor/Claude telling it to stop generating these loooong markdown files unless specifically asked. They aren’t useful (afaict) and they chip away at token usage/context window.

Chicago bike infrastructure keeps getting better and better 🚲 💜

I’m all in with Keigo Higashino — time to read the third in the Detective Galileo series: A Midsummer’s Equation

New year, new milestone with my TIL repo -- I just broke the 14,000 star mark 😵 github.com/jbranchaud/til

📚 I’m gonna read some books in 2026. I’ll link them all below 🤓

2025 Book Review I read 34 books this year. New for me this year was adding in a mix of kindle reads and audiobooks. I read a book that only 13 people recorded reading this year 😯 Some favorites: - Shogun books - The Devotion of Suspect X - Children of Time - The Stand

Happy New Year 🥳🥂‼️

I’ve played wingspan a bunch, but got to play wyrmspan for the first time last night. It’s an interesting variant of the game play. Still processing the strategy shift, but it was fun and would play again.

Alongside the Ruby 4.0 release last week, I published charm-ruby over Christmas, bringing @charm.land's excellent terminal UI libraries to Ruby. A full TUI framework, reusable components, styled output, forms, markdown rendering, spinners, charts, and a lot more! Demos below ⬇️

This thread of four tweets offers a neat mental model for working with coding agents

A reminder to junior devs that the questions you are hesitating to ask are a gift and you should go ahead and ask them. The fresh perspective and curiosity gives those of us who have been doing this a while a chance to reexamine assumptions and articulate things we think we know pretty well.

Ensuring I carefully read all AI-generated code by instructing the LLM to always discreetly inject 1 to 3 subtle typos/bugs into the features I ask it to build.

I found a good use case for git submodules earlier this year -- managing a private notes file for a public repo. The two things that made it work really well: - the submodule is a single-file repo - all submodule interactions are mediated via Taskfile tasks github.com/jbranchaud/t...

My next read is Sarah Cypher’s The Skin and Its Girl. Trying out my new labubu bookmark for this one.

yeesh, Minitest 6 with Rails 8.1.1 quietly doesn't run any of your tests and exits with a success status code. Pining minitest to <6 for now. github.com/rails/rails/...

How is YouTube Music as an alternative to Spotify?

I’ve upgraded a couple different Rails apps to Ruby 4.0.0 today. Quite uneventful for a major version bump. I’m grateful they weren’t painful upgrades, but with effectively no breaking changes, I’m kinda wondering “why 4.0?”.

AI-generated “art” for jigsaw puzzles is a pretty sad reality I guess we live in now.

On a whim I made a batch of naan from scratch for the first time. It turned out great. rasamalaysia.com/naan/

Time for my yearly listen to David Sedaris’ Santaland Diaries — his delivery is perfect in the narration and it’s packed with biting humor from start to finish.

Shoutout to all the people that keep public transit running on Christmas 🚂 🎄

This is NGC 2264, also called the "Christmas Tree Cluster." It's a cluster of young stars about 2,500 light years away. They were 'born' during the Pliocene Epoch (2-5 MYA), about the same time as early hominids like Ardipithecus or Homo habilis, so they're barely older than humanity. 🎄💫🔭

I have lots of Christmas movie favorites but a staple that I often watch multiple times each season is A Christmas Story 🎄

I’m not reading many “business” books these days, but Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test has been recommended by all the right people.

Whoever they have on the social media team over at @amtrak.com has *understood* the assignment. 💯 🧑‍🍳 💋 www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8yUE6cw/

I haven’t built a Lego set in a couple decades. Parents got me this Game Boy build and it was a blast. I’m really impressed by the quality — tactile buttons, interchangeable screens, all the small details are right.

ignore the title about caching, this is the best explanation of how LLMs work, period

I'm trying out overmind (as a replacement for foreman) on a side-project Rails app. The feature I'm most interested in is being able to connect to the individual processes via a tmux session. github.com/DarthSim/ove...

whoa, Chrome added a split view feature for displaying two tabs side by side

I'm using OpenAI's Atlas agent-mode to make all my gift purchases this December, which is why no one is getting anything for Christmas.

An under-used pattern in Rails apps is to create a reusable module of utility functions with Ruby's `Module#module_function`. www.visualmode.dev/create-a-mod...

I wish I would have had this plugin back when I was doing more Vim screencasting. github.com/NStefan002/s...

the markdown rendering plugin that I use in neovim has some really nice small touches, including using a subtle gradient for table borders github.com/jbranchaud/d...

Super useful, quick intro to using beads (a memory upgrade for your AI agents) with an existing project from @tolin.ski youtu.be/cWBVMEHPgQU?...

We’re watching How The Grinch Stole Christmas. It’s a performance of a lifetime from Jim Carrey.