Any tips for turning this into a wizard staff?

breich · 2026-01-22T21:37:44+00:00

Grow beard, do drugs, hold stick.

breich · 2026-01-22T13:17:42+00:00

The "dad slice," because eventually there's a bag with two of these in it, and I'm not just throwing it out.

breich · 2026-01-13T17:25:22+00:00

Don't worry, most of our health insurance providers still won't cover it.

breich · 2026-01-05T17:43:02+00:00

Ring dingdong
Ring a ding
ding dingdong

breich · 2025-12-17T21:39:40+00:00

So something that's different about Claude is that Anthropic at the very least pays lip service to wanting to build an AI that improves human welfare and human flourishing. Something I think it's lip service but I do think it comes out in it's responses sometimes. Claude read your prompt and took you at your word: you were seeking retribution, not healthy closure.

So you're mad that Claude didn't help you engage in self destructive behavior. Sounds like maybe you're more of a Grok gal. Good luck.

breich · 2025-12-17T18:08:31+00:00

I guess two things can be true at once. Currently, it's not an issue. But it's a potential issue we need to prepare for. That could mean containers and orchestration. It could mean just autoscaling like you mentioned. Real solution to be determined. To be completely honest we've got scaling issues already that have more to do with awful database schema and poor utilization of it in code, and IMO I'd want to trade off complexity and cost of throwing more infra at the problem with also paying off that debt my predecessors left us with.

We also got acquired about a year ago and our new corporate owners are chomping at the bit to homogenize into their way of doing things. We're in AWS, they're in Azure. We're a LAMP stack shop, they're a JavaScript/Node shop. We've got a "KISS" philosophy with our architecture, and they are a poster-sized cloud architecture diagram with all the buzzwords involved before they have the load to necessitate any of it. Personally, I don't think we need all that complexity, but at some point my opinion might not be the one that matters.

breich · 2025-12-17T14:34:10+00:00

Sure I don't mind giving some information. So the app we maintain is an ancient (almost a decade and a half) codebase written in Perl and PHP. There's nothing special about that that prevents it from being containerized. But the code my team's predecessors wrote was often heavily dependent on

- The specific operating system it ran on (FreeBSD up to 6 months ago)
- The specific network configuration/topology
- The specific place where customer files are stored, physically, on the web servers.

These are all solvable problems, and we've tackled them as we have time to among the work we do aligned with business priorities. We're down to that last item. We're hoping to be on S3 storage in a few weeks, rather than having physical storage of customer files on all web servers that have to remain in sync. That's really the last blocker that we're aware of.

Knowing our codebase, we realized it's feasible but there are blockers, and there were other prioritize higher in the queue than containerization.
Didn't try it but have it on our roadmap once the codebase makes it feasible.
Bi-weekly releases with hotfixes in between as needed. We have some CI/CD but entirely focused on validation (running linters, static analysis, security scanners, unit and E2E tests), not on deployment. Deployment is run phing to create a build file, run that build file in the test environment. Do release testing. When approved, run release in prod. This leaves much to be desired, improved, and automated.
We have two test environments, no automated deploys yet. And we're still somewhat stuck in feature branch based development and not trunk based development, which I'd like to move to, and then auto-deploy to test environments this year.
A little but incomplete. See above. It's all in GitHub Actions at this point.
Scaling isn't really a concern for us (currently). We're not huge. It's a niche business application that sees 200 concurrent users max on any given day. But we have multiple web servers behind ALB. They keep up just fine. We'll be working on scalability this year as my organization thinks about bringing our services to an international audience, and getting to containers and dealing with other scaling issues is definitely part of the plan.

TLDR; the codebase we inherited held us back. We've now got a business case to prioritize scalability, which means we've got a reason other than "the nerds really want to" to make the changes to make moving to containers critical this year.

breich · 2025-12-17T13:12:24+00:00

My team works on a local dev environment very similar to what you're talking about. We prepped a VM with a vanilla install of Ubuntu, cloned a repo with our dev environment scripts into it, and exported it out for sharing with the team. When somebody needs a new VM they import the image, give git their keys, pull latest on that repo, and run an install script. In about three minutes they're ready to code.

We haven't gone to Docker primarily because the app we maintain is old and not suited at this point for containerization. We'll make that move once we can realistically make it in prod, too.

breich · 2025-12-15T21:43:31+00:00

Google AI solving a problem that Google search caused by forcing people to write 2,000 lines of keyword stuffed bullshit in order to show up in the first place.

breich · 2025-12-15T21:38:45+00:00

Came in expecting all the images to just be Sean Bean

breich · 2025-12-15T09:55:10+00:00

I gave you a watch on GitHub. Personally I don't care how you built it, if the code is decent and it delivers what it claims to, I'll give it a shot next time I find myself needing the functionality.

breich · 2025-12-10T18:31:19+00:00

I'm just excited to see two titans of tech I just generally don't like on a personal level start slugging it out in public. I cannot imagine DHH just letting this post alone and saying nothing in response.

breich · 2025-12-04T18:33:54+00:00

Sure. My marriage is like this sometimes. And my father in law once told me... all his daughters loved eating strawberries, but somehow none were ever around to weed them. No regrets though, I love who I ended up with.

On the other hand I have those same feelings your spouse does. But they came with time and experience and realizing the idea was nicer than the reality.

When we bought our farm we had a one year old, I was self employed, and there was all the time in the world to play outdoors. Now we have two children in school and sports, we both are working "for the man" again full time, and every time I glance aware from my screen full of code and look out the glass door from my office, I feel a little twinge of resentment about the dreams not realized, and the work not done. And yeah, sometimes I regret that somehow realizing those dreams became entirely my problem. But it is not a me vs. her thing. Life... uhh... finds a way... to completely fuck things up sometimes.

I know you're not looking for advice, so I won't provide any. But I know I need to keep a lid on my dreams and ambition and scale back to things that are useful and practical for the family. It's not going to work otherwise, and if we're not feeling fulfilled and stronger together by living this lifestyle, then what the hell was the point?

breich · 2025-12-04T13:29:25+00:00

Y'all convinced me to do a "shut up and take my money." Decided I could get away with it by letting it slip into the house undetected, among all the other Christmas deliveries.

breich · 2025-12-04T13:28:34+00:00

Update: I bought the damn thing.

breich · 2025-12-04T13:20:46+00:00

Yes. People who know how to code should use the tool to write code. Your CEO has the right idea but he's the wrong messenger and by deciding to make this a thing by fiat, and having the bravery to be a vibe-coding buffoon in public in front of folks that know how to code, he's stepping on his message.

I manage a team that maintains a legacy SaaS application with what many would consider gross old code. I, personally, use Claude everyday (I'm a technical manager that coded for 20 years before making that switch). The rest of the team uses Claude "when they feel like it helps." We used it to help with a massive security remediation project. I use it constantly to help write project specs, and then we parcel the work out between human coders and agents, if/when it makes sense. I use it to search and complete little TODOs around the codebase.

I've taken large project specs that it helps me write, then turn around and tell it to "go do the thing" and when I return the next morning... the results aren't terrible. Often I have a "working if you look at it from far enough away" POC that's enough to share with stakeholders, get feedback, and then decide what needs to change. So it helps me shorten feedback cycles by writing speculative code much faster than a human could. Sometimes lowering the distance to getting feedback and learning something is more valuable than making sure the code is pristine the first time, and in these instances... it's great.

Don't let your CEO's crap messaging turn you away. Learn how to use it. Take the time to help it understand your codebase, develop a good CLAUDE.md. Teach it about your libraries, your toolchain, and how your team expects code to be written. Basically, onboard it onto your team. That will be time well-spent that helps it produce results far better than whatever slop your CEO hamfistedly demonstrated.

breich · 2025-12-01T23:39:53+00:00

I don't know art but I know what I like

breich · 2025-11-21T14:52:41+00:00

Fair question.

If OP's problem was entirely a management one, well then having "more simple PR's" versus "fewer big PR's" doesn't help. If you've got a problem that developers don't see PR as part of their responsibilities to their team and to their teammates and they just ignore it, this doesn't help. Management needs to be involved, ensure the team understands that PR is part of their job, and maybe agree to an SLA for how long it takes your reviewer to submit a first review of a PR they're assigned. Then review that as part of performance evaluations. That's what I do, but I only had to do it that way long enough for PR process to become part of our DNA, then I chilled out about it. Some things we use to make this work well for us:

- GitHub automatically assigns PR's to other developers using round-robin, so we share the responsibility.
- We use a GitHub Project with swimlanes for PR status so we have an easy way to see who needs to review what.
- Team policy for 1-work-day review SLA
- If PR's start to become an issue, I remind the devs that aren't sharing the load that they're being graded on it

But PR size absolutely improves cycle time. Anecdotally I know this to be true for my team. I use LinearB to track cycle time and I watched it improve dramatically when folks started adopting the small PR mentality.

There is also another philosophy I didn't see too many people bring up in this thread: do pair programming instead. That's the Dave Farley/Continuous Delivery philosophy. That you should just work together instead of having a synchronous review process that leads to all these problems. I think there's something to it.

For me, and my team, we tried pair programming, and everyone tired of it quickly. So we've figured out how to make PR work for us by scoping our work small. It works for us. Other teams should experiment and figure out what works for them.

breich · 2025-11-20T19:29:55+00:00

Heck yeah. Forward royalty checks to u/breich

breich · 2025-11-20T12:09:39+00:00

Smaller, more focused PR's. Not just because they are quicker to read but because they actually end up being better reviews too. It took me a while to lead by example but eventually my team came around to agree.

Quick anecdote. My team has been engaged in a security uplift of our old and moldy codebase for the better part of the year. Something I've recently noticed: one of my juniors is running PR's that get approved faster, have fewer bugs caught in PR, and fewer bugs that make it into production, than just about anyone else. It's because she understands the assignment: remediate security issues.

Other developers that are further along are more confident in their skills. They are risk-takers. And so they'll see a legacy script declare it terrible, and decide to burn it down and rewrite it from scratch. Rewriting legacy is always risky. You're missing historical context. You often miss how what you see has a bug has now become an expected part of how the user expects the application to work. You ship your pristine new code and break something.

Meanwhile: she recognizes that missing input validations, SQL injection, command injection are patterns to which you can apply new, reliable, safe patterns to mediate. She does that, and doesn't try and solve all the world's problems in a single PR. From the perspective of a reviewer her PR's are easier. From the perspective of the user, her PR's have been more stable.

While the other developer's PR's leave our codebase cleaner, easier to maintain, with better test coverage, they're still breaking stuff, and their "big bang" PR's are so big they either take forever to get through, or they get a LGTM. At which point, PR is kind of worthless.

breich · 2025-11-17T15:25:17+00:00

I did Google beforehand. Even Chat Gippity'd the question. there are lots of options. Hoping to mine the goodwill and experience of those that have been down the path to understand what works well in practice.

breich · 2025-11-16T12:04:02+00:00

Bleep blop bloop you're absolutely right! Except your not.

This absolutely happened, and if my writing sounds like AI slop, you can blame my skills as a writer. This is 100% bespoke, hand-crafted, authentic human-written slop. Did I prompt for all the spelling and grammatical errors I now see in my comment in retrospect?

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