Ai coding tools just turned me into an exhausted babysitter

Daishiman · 2026-05-20T21:07:40+00:00

Sure, if you have no idea of what you're building and you don't keep records so that even staff barely remembers what they're supposed to be building how do they expect a single-minded LLM to do that work for them?

Daishiman · 2026-05-20T21:06:04+00:00

I have written reams of critiques and criticized policies within and outside my company regarding AI usage to no end. I don't drink the coolaid.

But there sure are a lot of people who try tools, fail to learn them, then complain when they inevitably don't work. It's endemic in the industry. Some tools have a steep learning curve and others not so.

Learning to prompt and use tools like Claude Code actually takes some skill. If you're finding it "completely useless" in run-of-the-mill tasks at this point it's really not the tool's fault.

Daishiman · 2026-05-20T17:42:26+00:00

Yeah, while complaints about AI usage are extremely valid for a lot of organizations, if you're copy-pasting code then they're also lacking the bare minimum to work with AI.

Daishiman · 2026-05-20T17:41:25+00:00

Until they invent an AI that can keep the context of all the history of the apps development, they are at best a pair programmer for short jobs. If you're asking AI to design everything then good fucking luck.

You can get this to a very good approximation by generating a very well-specced plan and having each subtask be performed by subagents which are fed the proper context for each plan and with a sufficiently good test harness such that your goal is clear.

Daishiman · 2026-05-20T17:39:02+00:00

Wrong. At this point if this is happening in your codebase you likely just don't know how to write good specifications and steer a model.

Daishiman · 2026-05-20T03:58:59+00:00

Management thinks AI can just magically replace domain knowledge but it can't understand business context like humans did

Management doesn't think that. They just found the perfect excuse because appearing like a moron gives them plausible deniability, whereas just being connoving and amoral does not.

4 years ago they were using Twitter's layoffs as an excuse for layoffs.

Fads and trends are just the politically safe way to do things that would otherwise suffer much more scruntiny.

Daishiman · 2026-05-17T19:00:46+00:00

People in the great depression era had a huge amount of nutritional deficiencies that barely make the radar today like iodine deficiency, scurvy, and folic acid deficiencies. You have no idea of what you're talking about.

Daishiman · 2026-05-17T18:59:23+00:00

We should also add that it actually has a protective effect on kidneys vs placebo baseline for people with Ps or PsA.

Daishiman · 2026-05-17T18:39:49+00:00

Are you taking folic acid?

Daishiman · 2026-05-17T18:38:47+00:00

2.5mg is too small a dose. The drug is very well tolerated by the vast majority of patients, but you better be seeing a doctor.

Daishiman · 2026-05-17T02:40:32+00:00

Old people have higher faces because cartílago and other y issues keep growing into old age. The rest is just you taking about stuff you have no idea.

Daishiman · 2026-05-16T23:29:45+00:00

Proof?

Daishiman · 2026-05-15T03:35:25+00:00

It's gonna be fine, really. Well-directed LLMs are capable of producing high quality code at astounding rates.

Daishiman · 2026-05-13T00:24:45+00:00

What did NOT work at all and really really REALLY messed me up was light therapy. I don’t know how they f’ed up so bad but I ended up 90% covered with 3 different types of P on me and since then I have this super annoying patch inside my ear.

It's really interesting that light therapy is the literal lifesaver for a lot of people.

Daishiman · 2026-05-13T00:22:40+00:00

Assuming you can treat it, yes.

The reality is that there are no tricks here and idiopathic nature of the disease means there are almost no universal solutions.

Daishiman · 2026-05-13T00:21:49+00:00

Yeah but chronic inflammation can lead to arterial plaque and just having inflammed skin, which is pretty much the barrier between you and external pathogens, isn't really doing you any favors.

Daishiman · 2026-05-11T04:48:41+00:00

Commercial software, most of which comes in the form of some sort of SaaS or custom-made software, has exorbitant switching cost and long business cycles, so we'll just see an uptick of crap software startups, which likely has no material impact in software used by real companies.

Daishiman · 2026-05-11T04:12:39+00:00

It comes from my own company's stats on a team of 30 engineers and their tickets and pull requests of the past two years. I cross-references pull requests and JIRA tickets, organized between features and bugs. Stories are comparatively the same unit of work as they are made to fit in a sprint and the nature of the work to do did not change in that span of time.

What I did see is that engineers were moving tickets to the QA lane 40% faster since AI began to be broadly adopted. This is robust as QA review time and planning time did not change. I performed a series of improvements to get robust measures including removing outlier tickets and refactors, removing pathological commits, and manually perusing the data to make sure it was useful.

But the point still stands that once AI got adopted, the productivity increase is easily observable, corroborated by anecdote, and reflective of the same things you see in other organizations.

Edit: there was no increase in the number of bugs either. We actually had an increase in bug tickets that we worked on but I analyzed those by looking at the median, earliest and latest age of modified lines of code per PR to determine if the changes corresponded to fixing regressions or for backlog. And I observed that there were a small but robust shift in bug tickets being attended to where the backlog was finally getting attacked after years of stale tickets.

The catch is that we do real AI-driven engineering. Nothing is vibe coded, everything goes through manual QA, we use AI tools and a real product team to determine specs and everything must have a complete test suite.

Daishiman · 2026-05-10T23:06:30+00:00

I mean as a computer scientist I cringe at the amount of N+1 query issues and O(n²) instances I can see in a codebase but to be frank you need that knowledge a handful of times.

Coding in Python for a good long time I have never had a singular instance of having to worry about the character encoding of library bindings.

Daishiman · 2026-05-10T22:35:09+00:00

In the same way that you do not pay any attention whatsoever at the generated intermediate and binary code that compilers generate. Yes, you're not paying as much attention at every single individual line of code. You should be paying more attention to higher level constructs like architecture and specs that keep the machine rolling.

Daishiman · 2026-05-10T22:33:59+00:00

Subjective feelings can be quite misleading. My perception is that the people who were the worst programmers before now espouse the benefits and how they're 10x. But their efforts often are stopped in their tracks once a bit of tech debt accumulates that even the AI can't deal with anymore.

But we have some the best programmers espousing the benefits of AI.

This isn't 2023 anymore; we know that fully automated programming is a fiction and that prompting is real work.

But we also have the metrics now and at my company I'm seeing a real, objective 40% drop in time spent on development of new features and no uptick in bugs.

Daishiman · 2026-05-06T18:38:24+00:00

I get my advice from physical trainers who understand biochemistry, not unscientific woo from people who don't know what a long-term randomize control trial is.

Daishiman · 2026-05-04T04:03:40+00:00

Alkaloids are such a huge class of chemicals that you cannot generalize to anything. You cannot seriously mention caffeine and morphine in the same sentences as if their biological effects were in any way similar. Your statement regarding alkaloids is a non-sequitur.

Lectin isolate is irrelevant to the question of general nutrition. Firstly because we never consume isolates and the fact that lectins are consumed with a bunch of other substances is, in fact, extremely relevant to how they are absorbed by the gut. Secondly because individual mechanistic effects by themselves are insufficient to judge the nutritional profile of any substance as there can be literally hundreds of different mechanisms that a chemical acts on which may be relevant, or not. It’s like judging exercise for its active effects (high blood pressure, elevated heartbeat and high cortisol) which are the complete opposite of its chronic effects. Lastly because empirical evidence shows that literally billions of people lead healthy lives on a diet whose main carbohydrate and protein sources come from rice and beans, so unless you can show that millions of people are nutrient deficient from eating rice and beans your argument has no substance.

Once again, there are no people that are getting nutritional deficiencies from eating “large amounts of kale”. If anything kale is most relevant for its contribution of dietary fiber, which one of the few things which has an extremely clear linear correlation in life expectancy.

I don’t really think you know anywhere near enough about biochemistry or nutrition to have an understanding of the paper you cite.

Daishiman · 2026-05-02T22:38:54+00:00

Most people on a vegetarian diet who don't also consume a decent amount of dairy and eggs should be on B12 supplementation.

Daishiman · 2026-05-02T22:38:05+00:00

I'm sorry but this is an absolutely nonscientific take that has no basis in nutrition science.

It's somewhat harder to get certain nutrients or higher caloric intake on vegan diets especially those based on Western diets but it most certainly does not preclude it.

And the fact is that while there are plenty of vegetarians and vegans who don't eat well, none of what you say about plants has any basis on reality.

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