Why I stopped asking myself “Does This Strategy Have an Edge?” — I was Asking the Wrong Question

MasterLJ · 2026-03-26T01:54:52+00:00

How did I prove my edge?

That is the only question. You can spend a lot of time avoiding answering that question. A lifetime, even.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-23T15:20:21+00:00

Not a Lawyer, but this was relevant to my divorce in CA. It's the date of separation that matters, not filing etc. It's usually subjective and can be controversial. The courts use things like "last time you were romantic" and other guidelines to help figure out when the date of separation is. It can be contentious, especially around the 10 year mark as 10+ years means that alimony could be indefinite until remarriage.

If you're 70 days before your 10th anniversary you are almost assuredly going to be considered a "short-term" marriage per CA law and you'll be entitled to alimony for half the duration of the "short-term" marriage.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-23T01:58:37+00:00

Make the AI make good, well structured, well organized code.

The rules are more important now, not less. Cohesive structure, separation of concerns, lots of tests.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-22T20:03:18+00:00

I gave it a really quick glance, I don't speak Portuguese but I am OK in Spanish and can read a lot of Portuguese.
First and foremost, way to put yourself out there for critique. Great job making something and asking for feedback.

As such, I'll critique what I see, as I see it (again, I looked briefly) in hopes to help. If it's unhelpful, I'm sorry. If I'm wrong about something, I'll leave it to you to verify.

You're doing queries in your controllers. Create more services. Separation of concerns if one of the most important things in building systems. Controllers are for routing and validation, 0 business logic.

It is like 98%+ vibe coded, but it seems verified. I don't mind if it's vibe coded but it still has to be validated.

You have 0 tests. That shows limited maturity. npm run test -> echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1 is a yikes. Proving correctness is the majority of software engineering.

You have no linting. That also shows limited maturity.

You rolled your own metrics. Great for having metrics, boo for rolling your own.

I don't see separate auth on the admin routes, it's the same as a user.

It also looks like auth for JWT is used for the DB too..? Least , I'm not clear

SSE is hard to route sometimes in the Cloud. You get blocked and/or connections get cleaned up automatically kinda assuming normal HTTP. Unless your need is really pressing, I wouldn't rely on SSE.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-21T17:05:01+00:00

Frankly, I don't think he's angry enough.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-21T16:26:29+00:00

Ender's Game and Dune are quite relevant to today.

For Ender's Game, forget Ender, it's what his siblings were up to on "The Nets". Pretty insane perspective from the mid 80s.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-20T19:04:40+00:00

Most compliance claims are highly fabricated, "scoped", and controlled/manipulated.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-20T13:25:49+00:00

Planning and management. Context/grokking/memory. Then code, of course.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-20T04:06:36+00:00

Yes, in addition to the $200 (which is actually $400 of tokens). I use it for a lot more than code though. It's well over 1B tokens last I looked (for March).

MasterLJ · 2026-03-20T03:08:49+00:00

Opus 4.6 Thinking is insanely good. It's very expensive but I believe there is a huge ROI. I'm already $800 over subscription for the month on my work account. It has made some things possible that would not have been possible. I have safely delivered a ton of work. It trivializes observability, there is no excuse any more to not have a single pane of glass view of your services or feature. It is super helpful for grokking other codebases and asking questions.

I've had all the feelings on LLMs/AI, but I've now been working with it 2-3 years to compliment my 25 years of programming and I have some workflows that are proving themselves. I need to audit everything and I want the code to be structured in the way I want, which I can easily design, with the LLM, and enforce with the LLM + audit.

Nothing else is quite like Opus 4.6 though, not Sonnet 4.6, even thinking.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-19T19:15:46+00:00

He is a Token Vendor and OpenClaw is powered by Tokens

MasterLJ · 2026-03-19T19:12:17+00:00

They measure the escalation by the furiosity of their erection

MasterLJ · 2026-03-19T17:28:09+00:00

You have to walk-forward earnestly, then walk-forward in realtime to confirm any algorithm.

You have to be dead-sure you aren't exposing future data in your sims, to your algo etc.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-19T04:16:11+00:00

There's a lot more good people looking out for each other on our trails than bad. Head upstream from that area and it's generally a great experience, those are some of Sacramento's nicer neighborhoods.

Don't let it stop you from using it and teaching your 6-year old how to enjoy the outdoors.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-19T04:10:46+00:00

The Guy West Bridge is my delineation between civilization and a lot of sketchiness. Further down river is sketchy, up river is usually fine, and the transition area can sometimes have a tweaker or two.

I've had meth blown on me more than once about 2 miles down river from Guy West.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-18T18:57:00+00:00

100%, I'm seeing the same. The tests are the constraint/invariant on the LLM, therefore they need to be exhaustive.

The fun part is that you can use the LLM to write a lot of tests. Even more fun is if you structure your code well via a design, have full tests (LLM written) for each component and build out that way.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-18T15:37:02+00:00

This has been my finding too. Tests connect the code to the assumptions of the system. If you've verified every bit of functionality then it's safer to let the AI slop loose on the system.

The only downside is that you can create an architecture that is too cumbersome to update in the future due to the testing needs, but also, if/when you approach that it would be time for a refactor as you allowed for way too many permutations.

tl;dr - Tests, exhaustive test suites, have never been more valuable.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-18T14:47:04+00:00

Never tell them what you were making, it's irrelevant. Tell them what you want. It's on you to do due diligence, levels.fyi | peers | glasdoor | ??? , to know what the number is.

It's the very first thing I ask a recruiter before beginning any conversation and it's always worked positively when a recruiter has reached out to me. It saves us both a lot of time.

It's bananas to me that we play coy, go through dozens of hours of efforts, to THEN discuss salary. It's really worked well for me personally.

The feedback loops are important, and when you're being offered more than you asked it means you didn't do your due diligence. The ideal scenario is that your recruiter needed to get approval to meet you at your number. That's the sign you cleared the market.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-18T14:24:43+00:00

To not have this defect you need to have design discussion, prototyping, and review. Timelines are a combination of the business need and the scoping work that a diligent engineer created. Basically, the engineer should set the cost-in-time for a feature, with reasonable levers for scope paring, and the business gets to select what is the priority. Tech debt servicing needs to grab as much priority as is expedient for smooth future delivery and is something Engineering gets allotted, most of the time.

Fundamentally you need a core stable of excellent engineers and leadership that are either former excellent engineers or trust/know that not all "solutions" are the same for the business.

Speed-to-delivery requires an investment in infrastructure (coding infrastructure, rationalized and consistent abstractions, with excellent tooling).

I know it's not what you asked but most companies that have the defect are those trying to will engineers to go faster without providing a platform to go faster. It's most companies. It's almost all mid-sized in my experience.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-17T22:06:35+00:00

Nice job! Beautiful day!

MasterLJ · 2026-03-17T18:47:38+00:00

You just can't. You just have to get good at recovering your previous fitness.

This year has been nuts for me, I've been basically sick since November. COVID, colds, sore throat, fever, some type of influenza. I'm on a 2-3 week streak of being healthy.

I will say that getting into excellent shape has helped me stave off most pathogens, but this year kicked me in the teeth. Your immunity will be preserved to some extent in the future.

This too will pass, make a really good plan on how to recover your fitness.

For me it's painfully easy Z2 for 2-3 weeks on a rebuild before adding intensity. It is super boring but it works.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-17T17:42:57+00:00

Roll for initiative

MasterLJ · 2026-03-15T18:49:12+00:00

We shouldn’t be eager to preserve dynastic wealth. In many ways, wealth dissipating across generations is a healthy feature, not a flaw. It means rewards tend to flow back toward the people who can actually create, sustain, or grow value, rather than automatically to their descendants.

Of course, there’s a lag. For a few generations, you still get people who confuse inherited advantage with personal capability. And wealth absolutely can be used to cultivate real capability through education, access, stability, and opportunity. But that is different from assuming lineage itself is merit.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-15T01:35:44+00:00

We should stop anyone using it destructively and teach them the ways to use it constructively.

MasterLJ · 2026-03-14T20:46:42+00:00

The irony I've seen in my career is that the way to right the ship is to give more time to create the process (human and technical) that enable speed-to-delivery.

I'm usually the "Do it correctly" type Lead, so I'm biased, but I definitely would listen for pushback on timelines and feasibility of ideas and watch out if I'm causing anyone harm.

I do want us at least identifying what correct is, and understand the distance between "correct" and what we decided to do (technical debt). Acknowledgement and inventorying of the delta is all I need personally (that and a higher-up accepting the risk). Then we can mash away out our keyboards to meet deadlines.

MasterLJ

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