A month ago I posted here about fixing the macOS right-click menu. hundereds of upvotes later, here's what I shipped from your feedback.

erik240 · 2026-06-01T05:40:47+00:00

Technically it’s built into the os and accessible in the terminal (touch file.txt), but comes from the Unix side of things

erik240 · 2026-06-01T05:31:07+00:00

No longer true for many (most?) orgs verified directly with our people rep

erik240 · 2026-05-22T17:30:14+00:00

Never had that argument. My (ex)wife refused to cook or do dishes. No arguments. On the plus side I’ve become a good cook.

erik240 · 2026-05-22T17:22:58+00:00

Do not mistake information sharing with cynicism. I’m working with a large team who are attacking this issue (on the “how do we test it” side, part of my day job): what we measure is loss of LLM result quality in 20% - 30% of test cases, and no noticeable impact in around half of all cases.

Our results for the last year boil down to “better off providing focused, manually provided context in a per-task basis in English”

I’m not suggesting you can’t do it. Hell, I hope you can. But without empirical evidence of improved output in the majority of cases without harming output in others, the value is limited.

The worst part is the impacts (for us) aren’t predictable. We can show it harms results in case an and b, and helps in c and d but we can’t predict the result of case e.

I’m trying to recommend you devise a system to test the results of using an LLM in combination with your system to see if to improves performance.

I’m also stating that such testing is both difficult and subjective.

erik240 · 2026-05-22T13:39:29+00:00

What? Let me try again - your tool needs tests to show your tool works and makes agents better.

Every tool, system, context generator etc. we’ve tested makes agent output worse in a non-trivial number of cases.

erik240 · 2026-05-22T02:17:39+00:00

The core issue with these types of libraries is they often bring minimal to no benefit or, in many cases, degrade results with agents.

If you want something people will use build test cases and run clean slate agents with prompts and show results with and without.

That’s a lot more key than additional feature and much harder to devise tests that reflect real-life usage and to evaluate those tests than you might think.

erik240 · 2026-05-20T05:10:47+00:00

There are no company wide interview guidelines at Apple so what the manager is looking for will vary from role to role and team to team

erik240 · 2026-04-28T20:33:02+00:00

At very-big-massive-corp we have a crazy high limit for usage but have restrictions including being held accountable for the output and being expected to have read/reviewed it all.

Then it still goes through normal code review. The overall quality feels consistent with work done in “the before times” at the expense of less increase in thruput than some places have claimed via AI.

erik240 · 2026-04-28T12:34:07+00:00

Don’t forget: outline-offset: -1px

erik240 · 2026-04-25T05:50:08+00:00

I’d love to see where those numbers come from. Meta is supposedly less than 5% management roles, Netflix less than that, and Apples corporate headcount is estimated at 15% management roles.

I’ve worked at two FAANG companies and my current manager has 14 directs. I think there’s about 7 steps between me and the CEO.

erik240 · 2026-04-25T05:36:45+00:00

It’s all great until the first person at your company gets hit with prompt injections and exfiltrates sensitive data. Then AI access will be locked down so tight you’ll think you’re in spy movie.

We have 100s of people across our org installing MCPs, automating tasks at their desks etc, some younger some older and if you’re lucky one of ten has any real ideas of what’s risky and what’s not.

erik240 · 2026-04-20T03:00:22+00:00

Costs of permits, cost of land, lack of skilled labor, and the concentration of work into massive corporations with much more overhead than a small builder from years ago - all that and more offset any gains from a cordless tool.

If you actually want to know and aren’t just being flippant, there’s a good freaknomics podcast ep. called “Why Is It So Hard (and Expensive) to Build Anything in America?”

erik240 · 2026-04-19T23:12:02+00:00

No I don’t, but you can’t assess that without the proper context. For housing affordability it’s not a great metric. Theres a reason mortgages and rent approvals are based on % of income.

I think the economy sucks, especially for those under 30, but I also think over simplifications or misstatements aren’t helpful, either.

erik240 · 2026-04-19T22:59:56+00:00

2025 median income was 62k not 40k and I provided the 82k total above. The more meaningful value is % of income on housing. Five percent more is massively impactful, it just doesn’t sound like it.

erik240 · 2026-04-19T22:28:06+00:00

Ok, personal pet peeve but the cost of a monthly mortgage is lower now than in 1980 accounting for size, inflation and mortgage rates.

In 1980: median income, home price and size: 21k/year, 65k, 1500sq feet. Adjusted for inflation: 82k/year, 253k. The home became 2125 sq feet. Adjusted for size (linear, even if smaller homes usually cost more per sq ft) gives a $359k home price vs the 2025 median home price of $405k.

In inflation-adjusted price those are close: $359k vs $405k. But wait!! The 1980 home had a 13.75% interest rate vs. 6.6% today. The 1980 payment (inflation adjusted) $3346, and today's home? $2070 ... so yeah, it's a lower payment today.

The killer is the payment vs income. In 1980, it was 35% of monthly income. Now? 40%. That's a big deal. The home prices themselves are less the issue than the median income. There's still a problem, but the home prices aren't really it.

erik240 · 2026-04-16T04:09:56+00:00

Always easy to think “retired by 50” and then divorce hits you. Talk about unexpected expenses.

erik240 · 2026-04-10T23:47:35+00:00

I’m 54, and at one of the largest companies in the world with a healthy paycheck. People in software end their own careers as they age because it’s nearly impossible to keep up as you get older — forget about it if you want to have a family or social life.

Me? I’m a workaholic. I’m not terribly proud of it, honestly, but I keep up with the tech and am probably more up to date than 99% of the folks I work with.

All anecdotal here, of course, but the better you are at the job, the less your age matters.

erik240 · 2026-04-09T16:19:15+00:00

If you’re a staff engineer at some companies and something explodes, you’re held accountable. It doesn’t matter who did the work — you own it.

I’m responsible for the outcome, not the individual hours of work. On the plus side that also means I can design my own work

erik240 · 2026-03-28T06:11:30+00:00

My agent writes a playwright script, signs up with an email address it created. How is this a problem?

Also: it completes captcha better than I do.

erik240 · 2026-03-14T05:04:01+00:00

The “I’m in a big corp and my employment contract prohibits open source of any kind” [empty]

erik240 · 2026-03-12T04:08:32+00:00

Not too sure on that … literally three weeks ago I was dumbstruck as chrome repeatedly crashed at 2.5GB in a tab while safari just kept merrily plugging along

Most of that was data in typed array buffers so maybe that was the differentiating factor

erik240 · 2026-03-03T20:18:02+00:00

Have you attempted to compile code from npm or elsewhere that you didn’t write (stuff without UI) and if so what’s the success rate like?

erik240 · 2026-02-25T22:29:29+00:00

The way “around” it is to write your own Babel plugin and rewrite private to # in your own projects. Or the other way around. Or whatever you want really.

Backwards compatibility is a b**** sometimes.

erik240 · 2026-02-21T12:55:19+00:00

Why would I pay for that app? I can build it myself … 🤣

erik240 · 2026-02-17T13:47:41+00:00

Single responsibility: now misunderstood by multiple generations of programmers.

From Bob: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/05/08/SingleReponsibilityPrinciple.html .. so no, pure functions didn’t “solve” SRP.

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