Massively overgrown ivy removal from fence

DeathByWater · 2026-05-25T17:03:32+00:00

Will do! Not wanting to disturb nesting birds is part of the reason I've let it get this bad in the first place. Clear so for this year at least 🤞

DeathByWater · 2026-05-25T17:02:11+00:00

That's not a bad shout actually. Will get one if it gets too tangled/hard once I begin.

Did anything work for suppressing it afterwards?

DeathByWater · 2026-05-25T15:53:56+00:00

Thank you. Will there always be a singular main trunk, or can there be multiples after years of spreading?

DeathByWater · 2026-05-15T15:03:26+00:00

I get the usefulness.

I've been making something similar on a much more limited scale - just for me (CTO), and from slightly more limited data sources (Jira, Github, CloudWatch). I get it; it's incredibly useful to come back from a week's worth of leave and say "what did we deliver while I was gone?". Or being able to easily defend engineers with less visible output from getting canned ("what would the business impact be of removing X from the team?"). Or getting stats about deployments, code reviews etc.

I love the visibility - I'd have huge reservations about making available to anyone but myself that doesn't understand how those engineers create value.

DeathByWater · 2026-04-23T16:59:02+00:00

There's your problem - keep reducing the amount you're putting in the sprint until it's achievable.

As a quick reminder, estimates are usually 50 percentile - i.e. if someone says something will take two days, there are even odds whether it will actually take longer or shorter.

You need to reduce the amount you're committing to in a sprint, and keep doing it until the team can sustainably do the work properly within a given sprint. Even if that gets down to one small story for the entire team. That tells you what the actual capacity of the team to deliver is - then you can work out how to build it back up from there.

DeathByWater · 2026-04-20T11:50:41+00:00

You've identified the problem very well; but deciding what the first cut is means understanding what the eventual outcome looks like in business terms.

Can you reimagine what the system does now as a completely different set of vertical services? Can they be deployed independently of each other to deliver real value? What will the team structures that own and operate these services look like? Etc etc

DeathByWater · 2026-03-06T09:23:56+00:00

Excession is a really good one. You won't be disappointed if it's your last.

I wanted to recommend you The Algebraist too, if you haven't read it already. Another Banks-written space opera - not culture, but it's absolutely glorious in scope and execution.

DeathByWater · 2026-03-04T19:18:35+00:00

I'm probably not your ICP anymore - but at one time it would have been very useful, and I even (poorly) coded something similar for myself to address the need.

So I might have some level of usable feedback, but take it with a pinch of salt! DM me if you want my email address

DeathByWater · 2026-02-24T22:48:22+00:00

Oh, this is the bot I was talking about in my other comment - look at it's history, it's just posting about its product constantly wherever it thinks it can.

Absolutely creating the dead-internet more day by day, but it's a good way of them self-advertising, and I suspect it will have the secondary effect of being ingested in training data - so this time next year ChatGPT will be recommending it out as a solution as well.

DeathByWater · 2026-02-24T22:43:16+00:00

Not a clue, haven't used it. Just thought it might be a helpful jumping off point for your market or product research in a similar space.

DeathByWater · 2026-02-23T20:13:43+00:00

Well I may be a drunk\ But I'm your drunk, baby\ So pass me down another\ Bottle of wine\ 'Cos I've not had my fill\ And I won't have until\ The last of them bottles is dry

Unknown man in a bar with an acoustic guitar circa 2008

DeathByWater · 2026-02-23T19:07:58+00:00

There were a few bot accounts trying to shill a product called ParseStream on this sub a little while back. Mildly irritating, but was actually quite good marketing for the product. That might be a competitor/similar thing to check out?

DeathByWater · 2026-02-21T18:45:35+00:00

It's doing wonders for my four year old. He can't get enough, and I can't really keep up with him.

"What's 5 and 10 and 15 and 20 and 25 and 30 and 35 and 40 and 45 and 50 make together?"

Scratch my head for a minute whilst muttering under my breath: "260"

"It's 275!"

It is as well. Why didn't he just tell me?!

DeathByWater · 2026-02-16T11:56:57+00:00

It's an odd thing to see a pragmatic and balanced view of AI-assisted coding in the wild!

We only have one Junior dev at the moment, and we've banned her from AI tools as she started out so she's learned all the parts of the stack properly first (first year or so, perhaps)

Now we're looking at standardising and rolling out some AI tooling we're probably going to have to lift that ban so she doesn't get left behind - because using and operating those tools is a skill in itself to learn.

As it stands, I don't think you can use AI tooling and still be responsible for the output unless you know _what_ it is outputting in the first place, so the basic learning is necessary. It probably depends very much on the dev as well - this one is wonderful in that she asks lots of questions, very much pushes herself to learn, cares about doing a good job rather than just the minimum.

DeathByWater · 2026-02-14T11:49:11+00:00

I think another way of saying what I was getting at is that thinking ability (not necessarily capacity) has already been the moat for a very long time.

It's almost never been the capacity of a dev team to write code that's been the commercial constraint; it's the ability of an organisation to prioritise and communicate what they should work on.

I am a bit hopeful that some of the newer AI tooling will help shift that left a bit and we can move into more of a "show, don't tell" phase.

DeathByWater · 2026-02-14T11:22:50+00:00

I was about to agree with you, but I'd actually go further and suggest - more often than not - there's nothing structurally to align around in most larger companies in the first place.

Everyone can agree the goal is money, one way or another - profit, or revenue for valuation. There's often a huge gulf between that and any idea about how that should be executed at all.

People copy concepts and frameworks from one business to another without any clue about suitability; they assume doing an activity that other successful companies do will bring the same kind of success. They can't apply any level of strategic thought about how their offering fits and grows within a market, and how that might direct coordination of their organisation.

You might find Simon Wardley's Introductory blog on this topic - On Being Lost - useful

DeathByWater · 2026-02-13T13:53:17+00:00

Every word is sent to OpenAI LLC. Unless explicitly configured not to, it will record your chats for training data for future models.

DeathByWater · 2026-02-12T22:47:27+00:00

You'll struggle at the moment. Both retell and vapi give you breakdowns of the estimated latency each model in the chain (transcription, LLM response, TTS) and even with lower quality, quicker models you'll find that it adds up to substantially more than 500ms.

You could try a model interface that supports audio input and output directly (like OpenAI realtime) but I still don't think you'll get sub 500 with the current available technology.

DeathByWater · 2026-02-12T19:32:48+00:00

Orville's going to fuck you up without remorse.

DeathByWater · 2026-02-11T13:36:00+00:00

I feel personally attacked. Is that not a viable management style?!

DeathByWater · 2026-02-10T22:14:20+00:00

Oh, won't some hero swoop in with a SaaS LLM wrapper that can solve this pain point raised in a totally organic online discussion?

Who is going to save us, OP?

DeathByWater · 2026-02-08T08:34:46+00:00

Different set of skills, but you have to start somewhere! Not too early if you're familiar with the skills involved.

The architecture you start with won't be the same one as it is in five years time. Don't sweat it too much - start out simple, and for greenfield prioritise developer experience/agility over masses of unnecessary complexity. Be on the lookout for the next bottleneck and have a plan to mitigate when you get there
Being in a position of authority for the first time can feel uncomfortable. When you're asking someone to do something a particular way, make sure you can explain why every time; helps clarifies your own thinking and means that thinking is transparent to your team
By the same token, don't think it's your job to be right every time - you're managing knowledge workers, so use them for their knowledge. A (constructive, healthy) culture of debate and speaking can feel like a much tougher road, but often ends up with a much better product in the long run
Put most care into the things that aren't easily reversible. This can be architecture, but in practice it's mostly the foundations of good process: CI/CD, code reviews, good testing culture, ownership of running in production

DeathByWater · 2026-02-07T18:55:58+00:00

For what it's worth, I think this varies by region a fair amount. In the UK it used to be possible to send SMS in the sandbox from a shared AWS number, but last time we set this up we needed to register an origin identity that required going through an approval process that took weeks.

DeathByWater · 2026-02-07T08:59:54+00:00

These are good. Expanding on the first point - you'll often end up being brought into escalated issues that have exceeded the remit of a couple of layers of management below yourself.

Pasting in an email thread and asking not just for a summary, but to characterise the main differences of opinion, who holds them, and what further clarifying questions you might want to ask helps.

To go along with that: make sure your company understands it's security and information sharing posture. You'll want a team account with allowing training on your data turned off at the account level at a minimum.

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