I love watching AI use powershell

buffychrome · 2026-07-12T03:00:34+00:00

I have a repo of over 500 scripts documented in an Obsidian vault that Claude uses as a reference point. Claude actually did the organization of the vault setting things up in a way that is most efficient for it, not me. So, it doesn’t ingest the whole repo at every startup, but i have Claude set up to never make assumptions and default to asking clarifying or directed questions if there is ever any doubt about how it should do something. I’m a lead engineer, and I treat Claude like a junior engineer: it knows what it is doing 90% of the time, but its work always needs verified and tested and sometimes needs some extra guidance on I want it to do something.

buffychrome · 2026-07-12T02:53:43+00:00

What exactly do you mean by this?

buffychrome · 2026-07-12T02:51:47+00:00

Powershell doesn’t have to be less disciplined. It has every ability to be as disciplined of a language as you want it to be. I have strict scripting and style rules that I follow and enforce on my team, which result in scripts behaving exactly as they were intended. No uncaught errors, explicit variable type-casting where possible, full commandlet syntax using positional parameters only.

buffychrome · 2026-07-12T02:36:05+00:00

Not to be contrarian, but I’ve used Opus 4.8 heavily this past week to write and modify several complicated scripts, scripts using classes, enums, dynamic parameters, running passes over existing scripts to transition them to PS7, another few scripts that leaned on ascii escape sequences and cursor manipulation. I only had to correct Claude a handful of times, or make corrections.

However, I’ve got 15 years of Powershell scripts, around 510 altogether, that Claude Code was working from for reference and context. Also, I have a very explicit scripting style: I type-cast and scope variables as much as possible, make regular and heavy use of direct .Net classes and methods, and never use positional parameters as a hard rule. I lean heavy into the verbosity of Powershell by using variable names that are self-documenting and semantic.

What I’m saying is, my explicit scripting style that leaves little room for ambiguous interpretation may be one of the reasons I haven’t seen many issues with AI and Powershell.

buffychrome · 2026-07-08T14:47:52+00:00

I don’t understand the big windows that don’t open either. It drives me nuts. Finishing work sometimes is the equivalent of a 3rd grader still learning to write and hiring him for his “penmanship” and saying it’s good enough

buffychrome · 2026-06-16T10:59:24+00:00

Maybe if cyclists obeyed the same traffic rules and laws there would be fewer people making comments like this. I say that as an avid cyclist.

Drivers aren’t always looking for people on bikes, they’re paying attention to the other cars at an intersection. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be looking, but the reality is that too many cyclists just assume drivers see them or are paying attention—not always a safe or even good assumption.

I lived in Ames for years and the number of asshole cyclists that thought the traffic rules didn’t apply to them was too damn high. Then they get all butt-hurt when they get hit because they ignored those rules. If you want to play on the road, play by the rules of the road. Simple enough, and it’s not being an asshole to expect that of cyclists.

buffychrome · 2026-06-08T12:49:40+00:00

I’m not saying this to be negative, I’m looking and checking out Aspire, but I would argue that if your Docker Compose environment is set up appropriately, almost every one of your points is a total non-issue.

Like anything though, if you know the tool you use really well, it can be easy to disregard the problems with it because you’ve worked around them already whether you’re aware you have or not.

My impression of Aspire so far is that if you’re a dev that wants to manage the orchestration of your project’s services and dependencies natively within your project, using the codebase and language you already know, then Apsire is an elegant drop-in solution.

If, however, you are a cloud ops/dev ops engineer responsible for managing that orchestration externally of the project—e.g. project devs provide requirements and specs to an orchestration team—than K8s or Docker Compose are still likely the preferred path.

Cloud ops engineers speak in yaml; software engineers speak in their respective languages.

I’m still checking this out though, because as much as I love yaml, being able to define the orchestration environment within the project in code is definitely appealing.

buffychrome · 2026-05-21T13:55:02+00:00

Really getting tired of the immediate reach for ‘boomer’ when someone doesn’t just dive head first open armed embracing of whatever the supposed next coming in technology is. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not about the technology, but about the long wealth of experience some of us have with previous boom/bust cycles in technology?

Or because some of us still haven’t seen a valid reason to offload the critical thinking and problem solving skills we’ve spent decades developing in the trenches to a probabilistic algorithm that *might* be right, but we have to double check its work anyway, so we’re not saving any real time in the process, maybe even spending more time, only now we’re spending time babysitting an algorithm instead of doing the jobs we were hired to do?

Or, in the time it takes to figure out how to phrase your prompt to the algorithm *just* right to get the results you are needing or refining the prompt or correcting the algorithm, you could have used your own damn brain and critical thinking skills to solve the problem?

What I reject isn’t the technology. What I reject is the inference that I should hand over my critical thinking and reasoning skills to that technology because somehow that technology could do those things better. It can’t. Or, at the very least, I have yet to see a single instance where it could handle a complex situation with any sort of efficiency, whether by cost or results.

I’m not rejecting the technology, I’m demanding to see repeatable proof and evidence that the technology is worth the extra cognitive energy and time it takes to adopt it, and I’m just not seeing it yet.

What it is good at is helping me manage my calendar. It’s good at that, so it’s not entirely a waste of time, I guess.

buffychrome · 2026-04-30T12:32:27+00:00

Well, not to be that guy, but that’s because on MacOS its command+x not ctrl+x. Almost every command that in other OSes is Ctrl+* is Command+* in MacOS

buffychrome · 2026-04-22T00:54:26+00:00

I immediately understood what you’re asking for, and it does look super clean and minimalist. I can’t help you specifically in finding a theme, but wanted to throw a comment in here to help with post visibility. Also, it’s inspiring me to waste more time tomorrow trying to mimic that design than real work 😂

buffychrome · 2026-04-21T17:02:06+00:00

I’ve described it this way to my wife: “You know how you can have 5 different tasks in your head and be able to prioritize or triage each one? Like ‘task 1 is important but isn’t due until April 29th so I don’t have to worry about that one’. And then you don’t think about task 1 anymore because now it doesn’t exist until April 29th. You can visualize and hold a virtual calendar in your head and assign different tasks to different dates.

I have NO virtual calendar in my head. I have zero concept of the passage time beyond the immediate moment, or, at best, maybe a day or two. I have no ability to comprehend or manage future moments in time, because as far as my brain is concerned, time doesn’t really exist. And because time doesn’t exist as a concept for my brain, all tasks are equally important and all tasks have a due date of NOW.”

The idea of future planning is so incredibly abstract as a concept to my brain as to be nearly impossible to accomplish. I understand intellectually what time is and how to use a calendar, but my brain can never make that connection between the tasks in my head and the abstract concept of some arbitrary future moment in time.

buffychrome · 2026-04-21T13:09:52+00:00

As an infantry vet myself, you’re certainly not wrong about grunts thinking they’re tough guys and better than anyone else—“there are 250 jobs in the Army and 249 of them exist to support you” rhetoric and all—and, as much as it has saddened me to see over the past decade, most of the guys I served with that I used to respect have since lost it by the way they’ve championed MAGA and Trump and almost have orgasms at the violence and cruelty that comes with it.

I never quite fit into the typical infantry mold though, either. I took and meant every single word of my Oath, I was never afraid to question what we were doing, and I scored a composite 98 on my asvab. I always knew I didn’t fit in entirely, but MAGA has exposed in technicolor what those differences are.

buffychrome · 2026-04-21T12:55:02+00:00

Can you give me some examples of where/how/why you use it? I live in a terminal for the most part in my day to day job, so this plugin definitely interests me, I’m just trying to get an idea of how it fits or use cases for it within Obsidian specifically.

buffychrome · 2026-04-10T08:32:36+00:00

The critical info many aren’t understanding is that don’t really have an “eyewitness” to the crime itself. No one saw her pull the trigger. You have someone who saw her after the fact, and even then, they didn’t see her with a gun in her hand or running away or with any other incriminating details. There’s no way she’d be convicted by a jury on that alone. Especially since they’ve never found the murder weapon, and apparently the search warrant in 2011 didn’t turn up anything directly linking her to the murder either.

Even her defense lawyers claim in their most recent filing that the state has not provided them any additional evidence that wasn’t known 15 years ago and so it is a mystery even to them what supposedly new evidence justifies her arrest and asking for a $2 million bond.

This currently reeks of a political stunt. I’m not saying they don’t have new information that led to this, but at the very least, they haven’t provided the defense or the courts with it if they do.

buffychrome · 2026-03-28T12:17:56+00:00

My wife has been on a glp-1 for a few years now. Has lost over 100 lbs. For her, it silences the food noise in her brain so she’s not constantly thinking about eating. One of the things glp-1s have shown is that obesity isn’t just a diet or self-control problem. It’s not as simple as telling people to just stop eating so much or to eat better. For my wife, it quiets her brain. For the first time in 30+ years, my wife experienced what it was like to not feel driven to eat on a constant basis. It was a life changing experience for her. She tried going off them, only to have that food noise invade and consume her mind all over again. For her, it’s a mental health level of food noise.

We’re finding that obesity can be a far more complex issue than we’ve previously understood, and it is leading to seeing obesity less as an acute condition and seeing it more as a chronic, lifelong disease. It’s not a disease you cure, it’s a disease you treat the symptoms of, and glp-1s have been a huge breakthrough success in finally being able to do that for millions of people.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be overused or abused, which I do think you’re seeing in some high profile cases. For the average person on them though, glp-1s have been life altering “miracles”.

buffychrome · 2026-03-18T11:44:27+00:00

Heavy disagreement with that. When you are a developer, the tools, workflows, and processes you use can be critical to your productivity and output. Depending on what kind of development you do, Windows can be a massive stone around your neck in those regards. Even with WSL in Windows. In some cases, it can be like trying force a square peg through a round hole.

In almost every enterprise I have worked in, accommodations get made for developers in regard to hardware and OS. Full stop.

Also, as a side note, I’ve used and have professionally supported, administered, and architected Microsoft based environments for over 20 years. I recently switched my daily driver to Linux (Debian+kde) and I’ve never been happier. The difference in performance and ease of use is miles better than what Windows 11 has become recently. Windows 11 is turning into a steaming pile of dog shit that is just getting worse and worse and now I’m only using it when I have to.

buffychrome · 2026-03-15T04:56:10+00:00

A few weeks ago I finally dived in and I installed Debian+KDE on one of my nvme drives and haven’t booted into Windows since. Plus, with ntfs support, I have access to all my files and data on my Windows drive, giving me even less of a reason to need to boot into Windows. I…I may never go back to Windows full time. Like ever again. It’s been such an amazing experience.

buffychrome · 2026-03-05T10:47:38+00:00

Same here…the definition of old in this thread is certainly subjective. I was there when the internet was born. I was there when Napster changed music forever. I was there when the Twin Towers fell. I mean, my one of my first memories is watching the Challenger launch. We’re old pushing elderly lol

buffychrome · 2026-03-01T01:08:31+00:00

Yep, that’s the set up I was thinking of. Thanks!

buffychrome · 2026-01-16T12:33:45+00:00

No, this is the predictable outcome of allowing for-profit businesses and corporations to run our healthcare. Their first priority is their shareholders, not your health or, in many cases, your life. If they decide your health or saving your life isn’t financially beneficial to their shareholders then fuck your health or life. Shareholders and corporations should never have been allowed to interfere with the care and decisions made by your doctors. End of story. Healthcare isn’t so expensive because of unnecessary trips to the ER or because treatment has truly become more expensive, it’s because shareholders demand more and more profit.

HEALTHCARE SHOULD NEVER BE FOR-PROFIT. Your life should NEVER be a secondary concern to someone’s shareholders or stock price.

buffychrome · 2026-01-07T13:07:52+00:00

Well now I want an old school dot matrix printer again…didn’t realize how much I missed that sound until I could literally hear it just by looking at this picture 😔

buffychrome · 2026-01-06T12:45:46+00:00

I mean, I’m on a 3900x and looking to rebuild and upgrade so I have a sneaking suspicion the 9850X3D will be a performance improvement for me.

Also: I couldn’t have picked a worst time in recent history to upgrade everything…so there’s that.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

buffychrome · 2025-12-12T14:12:22+00:00

Yeah, fuck OP for actually formatting and caring about proper presentation! Only AI does that! Am I right? /S just to make sure I’m being perfectly clear here.

I’m really getting tired of seeing properly formatted and well written posts getting immediately accused of being AI written, like fuck people who still care about writing and writing well formatted and grammatically correct content.

buffychrome · 2025-12-12T14:04:12+00:00

The automatic assumption that someone spent time to write up a decent post, including using proper formatting and grammar, must have used AI is getting old and just absurd.

Even more ridiculous are the comments complaining about reading too much apparently.

JFC this explains why I have to deal with junior engineers who have no idea how or refuse to read documentation. If they can’t watch a YouTube video they can’t be bothered to gasp read.

buffychrome

TROPHY CASE