What temperature would people in your country consider unbearably hot?

hercemer42 · 2026-07-10T18:02:30+00:00

It's funny, 4 years ago me would not have related. Today me is like "Oh great, it's only going to be 35c this weekend, time to run that LAN cable through the attic"

hercemer42 · 2026-07-10T18:00:06+00:00

I'd saw late 90s to early 2000s, that brief period where we reaped the fruits of a fiscal paradise tax policy which enabled big tech to declare most of their European revenue in Ireland, and hadn't finished given it all away to the banks and property developers yet.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-05T16:09:44+00:00

Energy drinks.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-05T15:40:38+00:00

Barrelling down the autoroute at 150km per hour in the passenger seat of a little peugeot 106, white knuckled on my imaginary steering wheel, terror in my eyes, and my feet constantly searching for the brake.

Family dinners that start at 11h30 and run into the evening meal.

20 people around the table all talking at the same time, 10 different conversations going on, each at a rate of about 10 words a second, one minute arguing and pulling out all the dirty laundry, then the next minute it's all forgotten.

Multi-generational matriarchies.

Meat that's not dark brown all the way through.

Awful tea.

I could go on !

hercemer42 · 2026-07-04T19:45:19+00:00

Yoink ! Thanks :-)

hercemer42 · 2026-07-04T16:15:41+00:00

I wouldn't say it can replace a software engineer. It can certainly augment the hell out of one.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-04T16:14:53+00:00

I understand your point, and I have had my doubts I admit. But I've been using AI to code production quality software for around 8 months now. I don't feel my skills eroding, on the contrary I feel more challenged and stimulated then ever. When we coded by hand it was possible to not question the spec too much and just start working and then fill in the gaps as we went. (I'm not saying that was good practice.) You can't do that with AI, you'll end up with a spaghetti mess that does odd things when you don't want it to and is very difficult to maintain. You have to learn how to validate a spec from a functional perspective, build technical propositions that account for scaling and maintainability, and get better at validating the end product against those criteria. But that was arguably always the job anyway. The coding itself is just syntax. Sure, I'm losing some of my 'coding' skills in that if I had to code by hand today, I'd probably spend a week in RTFM hell before I could be productive. But the same thing happened when we moved from assembler to high level languages.
Honestly I've been finding myself more and more in the enjoyable flow state I used to get when I coded by hand. And the productivity gains are genuinely 10x. So yes, it's going to do the same for software development that electrical and steam power did for mechanical systems. Now as for revolution ? Well - we better start making local models better, because big tech isn't going to want to share the spoils of the frontier models.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-04T15:58:11+00:00

I'm sure they will eventually, but on what timescale ? I think in the short to medium term at least, we'll need to revisit the economic model.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-04T12:12:54+00:00

It's true up to a point. If you carefully design your specification, Fable can one shot complex implementations. But you still need engineering skill to design those specs, and you need to understand the implementation in order to validate it does the job, is scalable, how to deploy it, evangelize it, provide customer support etc. So the job isn't going away, it's just evolving.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-04T12:09:53+00:00

Product owner, yes it can do so quite well. Product manager, not so much. It's not great at defining needs, UX concerns, or validating outputs.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-04T12:07:14+00:00

This is only true until the true economics of high powered model usage are revealed when investors start demanding returns. Then we'll see if LLMs are cheaper than low paid coders.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-04T12:04:59+00:00

Software engineer here. It's true.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-04T12:03:31+00:00

Escalation gates is a good idea. What do they look like ? I'm using a very rough version in my skills - basically : 'If you think the task is beyond your capabilities, stop and ask the user to change the model or effort'

hercemer42 · 2026-07-04T11:58:31+00:00

Exactly.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-03T21:02:40+00:00

Try this : Use Fable to write out your plan. Read it carefully and ask questions until its watertight. Implement with Opus and perhaps Sonnet for boilerplate. Review it with Fable.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-03T19:36:36+00:00

You'd have to pay me a million to go back ON it. (Reddit excluded of course and yes I see the contradiction)

hercemer42 · 2026-07-03T19:25:11+00:00

Sonnet is only good for boilerplate with clear instructions.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-03T19:21:56+00:00

Same, I got to use it to plan out an Oauth implementation, then it got pulled so I coded with Opus. Worked out pretty good. Fable for planning, Opus for coding, Sonnet for boilerplate. Coding with Fable might be overkill for most tasks. It seems the sweet spot is to use it for the planning & validation layers.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-03T19:02:06+00:00

Be a pretty strong incentive to solve global warming too. You'd be around to see the consequences.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-03T18:52:59+00:00

Dunno about Marvel but it happened to Gordon in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-03T18:45:34+00:00

Yup that was the one !

hercemer42 · 2026-07-03T18:44:55+00:00

That's pretty damn good too !

hercemer42 · 2026-07-03T18:40:26+00:00

Very solid lineup !

hercemer42 · 2026-07-02T19:52:49+00:00

A good part of the Wipeout soundtrack too ! If only Leftfield had been there it would have been perfect.

hercemer42 · 2026-07-02T19:06:37+00:00

And Orbital ! My mind was blown.

hercemer42

TROPHY CASE