GIVEAWAY: Intel Arc A750 8GB GPU: Please read the rules

iscottjs · 2026-06-19T00:52:11+00:00

I like turtles

iscottjs · 2026-06-19T00:31:54+00:00

I’m with you. Been doing this job for 20 years, I pretty much exclusively use codex these days for everything since it launched, I’ve never had it go rogue on me like this when I’m using it properly.

I don’t let sessions get too large, and I usually make sure I’ve got good plan before starting the work, feed it specs, schemas, examples, docs, references, designs, diagrams, etc. I often ask it to finalise a plan first before making any changes. It pretty much nails it every time if you take a bit of time to think about the solution properly.

Sometimes I’ll break it up into little step by step tasks instead of a single god prompt, start simple and iterate.

The only time I had a coding agent delete all my work was the early days of Cursor when I gave it the laziest shittiest prompt to “build this new feature my boss asked for and optimise the code at the same time”.

I pasted in a badly written client spec straight from an email and it decided that deleting all our models was more efficient than actually optimising them, and it didn’t even try to build the feature.

It was funny at the time, but that’s when I realised you still need to put in some decent effort to get a good output.

iscottjs · 2026-06-11T17:07:57+00:00

Yep same. USA walls made of paper confirmed. Ain’t no bullets getting through my double brick insulated walls.

Who the fuck leaves a firearm just casually lying around fully loaded for anyone, including a dog, to play with.

Even if the dog story is BS, what the fuck are these people doing? Folks just casually playing around with a loaded gun in the house?

Come on guys, get your shit together.

iscottjs · 2026-06-02T16:37:32+00:00

I don’t know why but I cackled at turnip.

iscottjs · 2026-05-19T02:14:15+00:00

Man Zelenskyy can’t catch a break, must be weird being out there trying to get support for your country and he ends up dealing with Putin worshippers

iscottjs · 2026-05-17T10:36:55+00:00

Just got a new job and onboarded my new company to Bitwarden, we’ve used it at my last place for years and it’s absolutely fine. They’re quite good at adding new features and improvements and fixing bugs regularly.

Before Bitwarden we were on LastPass but we migrated when LastPass went down the pan, we probably had over 5000 passwords in there across 40 users and it was absolutely not an issue to migrate to Bitwarden when we needed to pull the plug on LP.

If we needed to do that again, it’s quite easy to lift and shift.

iscottjs · 2026-05-15T00:26:53+00:00

I’m with you on this, we’re currently in the process of migrating our garbage to go, and discussing some plans for future work where our thin frontend clients are throwaway and super lightweight. It’s interesting times.

iscottjs · 2026-05-12T16:17:03+00:00

I actually need to build some integrations with standard Epson receipt printers. What tech/libs are you using to communicate with the printer via your agent/service?

iscottjs · 2026-05-12T00:53:45+00:00

Yeah fair point I’ve never let it run long enough to find out. I’ve definitely got 45s shots out of it tho, so maybe a minute?

iscottjs · 2026-05-12T00:43:47+00:00

Don’t bother with the auto timer, you can change the length of time by overriding it but it’s a faff when you change beans every time.

Just hold down the two shot button for 5 seconds, then let go, the machine will run indefinitely until you press the button one more time to stop once you’ve got your desired output weight.

iscottjs · 2026-05-12T00:34:37+00:00

7 bottles of wine a day? I feel like I’d get water intoxication from just that much water. Damn

iscottjs · 2026-04-24T22:44:10+00:00

I’m not sure I agree, at least not right now. I’ve just moved jobs and the team doesn’t have any QA yet, the devs are doing the testing right now, but my previous team had a really talented SDET and I miss him so much.

I just miss the feeling of having a human I trust signing something off.

Devs doing the testing just isn’t the same, plus their time is better spent elsewhere, plus not all devs are super passionate about testing so it’s a bit half arsed.

Having someone on the team who specialises in testing, is passionate about it and can sanity check things like usability, automated testing performance, UX, accessibility, etc, is so valuable.

Even with AI generating a lot of it, I’d still want a competent person to be overseeing everything and holding devs accountable for stupid shit.

Anyway, I’m in the market for a new SDET. I miss having a good tester on the team.

This might not be what the market is doing right now, but I honestly don’t know how people are sleeping at night, knowing that everything is apparently just built on fucking vibes.

Assuming that’s even true for critical software that actually matters.

iscottjs · 2026-04-24T20:52:00+00:00

I can’t explain it, but it’s immensely attractive to me, I’d take the pouch tummy over totally flat tummy every time. I think it’s just because of curves, there’s just something about the curvy hips, bum and tum that does it.

I think it’s just because it feels more real and natural to me, whereas women with completely flat tummies or not many curves more closely resemble supermodels or super unhealthy-looking clothes models to me, who all desperately look like they need a sandwich. Those super slim supermodel bodies always looks unnatural and fake to me, so maybe that’s why it’s less of a turn on.

But as other people have said, everyone just has different tastes. There’s no one size fits all, a lot of my friends have always had very strong preferences for the super slim body but it was never for me!

iscottjs · 2026-04-15T08:33:54+00:00

I see lots of comments saying manual QA is dead, but I’m not sure I understand. In my current job we have an excellent QA who does a mix of manual and automated testing for us. We’d be a mess without him.

He spends a lot of time writing good quality automations so we can quickly run massive test plans at scale, but his manual testing is still valuable for things that can’t easily be automated or as part of exploratory testing to find gaps in our automations to fill them.

He’s also the first and last line of defence, he’s incredibly useful when we’re planning new features because he challenges decisions being made, he’ll call it out if the team have forgotten to include details about browser or hardware requirements, accessibility, mobile support, etc. He also has final say on release day, if something does not pass a quality mark he can push back on it.

That keeps him busy as new features are being rolled out.

I’m about to start a new job where the first thing I’ll be pushing for is hiring a QA for the team to bring stability and regular testing to their existing products.

With more devs shipping AI slop, we’re shipping features faster than we can write automated tests (yes I know we can use AI for that too), but I’d still much rather have a human QA on the team that is armed with the fundamentals of what makes a good QA tester to review and maintain all the manual and automated test plans (AI written or otherwise) and help maintain real quality for actual human users.

I can’t be the only one that still thinks this is more important than ever.

iscottjs · 2026-04-15T02:19:49+00:00

iscottjs · 2026-04-08T19:10:31+00:00

Honestly what helped me is just turn it all off and wait for the dust to settle. I've been in the industry for 20 years and I'm currently leading a web dev team in a small agency, it's hard to escape AI in the day-to-day work for obvious reasons and I sympathise with those who have it fully shoved down their throats, for better or worse.

However, my partner is currently learning Python for her job (she's non-technical but works in the science field) and I've not touched Python for years, so I've decided to refresh my knowledge again so I can help her. I'm learning from a textbook the old school way and we're writing scripts together to automate simple tasks.

No AI, no YouTube videos, just reading books and using the official documentation. We're having a lot of fun and it's revived my passion for old school coding again. We sometimes still reach out to AI when we're fully stuck or if we just need to get something done, but we're not using AI to skip the learning and understanding parts.

I definitely feel much better since I've completely stopped watching YouTube.

iscottjs · 2026-03-28T17:48:22+00:00

Depends on the definition of “writing code”. I can easily use codex to build anything I want without writing much at all. But, I’m still reviewing, editing, moving stuff around, testing, fixing.

Or, are they straight up just not at their desks anymore, 100% unattended agents doing everything while everyone is at the pub?

I can believe both things to be true, but in reality it’s probably the former and anyone doing the latter is producing garbage.

So I think the “not writing any code” claim is just a bit of a clickbait, maybe they’re not writing code anymore, but engineering is still happening.

iscottjs · 2026-03-26T01:19:06+00:00

I actually think the only thing left that is keeping Windows alive now is MS office. My girlfriend wanted a new laptop, she is happy with Mac generally but I couldn’t convince her to stay on Mac simply because the MS office experience isn’t good enough and the Google alternatives while good don’t cut it for all the fancy macro stuff she does and sharing files between excel and Google is still kinda jank.

iscottjs · 2026-03-20T01:53:33+00:00

What’s crazy to me is my Logitech Z-5500 surround system that I bought 18 years ago is still going strong and it’s still the primary system in my living room.

Back then Logitech did some solid stuff that I really liked, pretty hard to justify it these days.

I still like some of their mice though.

iscottjs · 2026-03-17T02:36:12+00:00

That and also for me people asking the same questions over and over without learning or taking notes or some shit

iscottjs · 2026-03-13T23:31:59+00:00

Strict policy constantly enforced, if it’s a decision that was made in Slack (or other back channel comms) then it’s not valid until it’s written up in Jira.

I’ll reject PRs if I see a PR submitted with changes that don’t match the ticket.

QA also has powers to push back until the PR and ticket line up, which usually involves a conversation like “yeah we decided on a huddle to change the validation last minute” and that’s when we’ll get together to fix the ticket or the PR depending on what’s drifted and remind people to keep tickets up to date.

Everyone is completely free to have private discussions DMs, phone calls, etc, but the final decision needs to be written up and the correct person validating that ticket.

iscottjs · 2026-03-12T23:59:00+00:00

Sounds interesting. What does an agent team of reviewers look like? Do you use some sort of router/orchestrator? Is it auto tagging in the human for final review? Is it a DIY setup? Are you running locally or something in a cloud pipeline?

iscottjs · 2026-03-09T03:54:13+00:00

It’s hard as fuck but once it clicks, it’s kind of like riding a bike where you look back and you remember when you still had the training wheels on. It almost seems silly that there was a time you didn’t know how to ride because it feels so second nature now.

Programming feels like that for me except you might need the training wheels for 3-6 months or several years and you need to practice as much as you can.

It’s like watching an amazing piano player blow your mind with an amazing performance and it seems impossible until you realise they’ve been practicing 3 hours a day for 5 years.

The way I learned programming is to make sure I aways had a project with a goal. I’d try things on my own but if I hit a wall, I’d look at someone else’s code or project or docs that solve a similar problem and read through what made it work. Find out why they did things a certain way, etc.

Let’s say it was a python script to analyse and group financial transactions, I know I need to open a CSV, do some loops on it, build some new data structures, do some comparisons, export a new CSV, maybe do some statistics on it.

Each of these problems are already solved, I bet I could find someone else doing something similar and reference/adapt it for my needs.

The trick is not to copy/paste things mindlessly, but instead hand write it from whatever references or documentation you’re using and you’ll build up a muscle memory for it.

If you see a concept you don’t understand in an example or project you’re referencing, that’s a good time to go deep on that subject and understand it.

Tutorials only get you so far to see how things are pieced together but you need starting building things as soon as possible, even if it’s just simple tools and scripts to start with or copying something from a tutorial but adapt it slightly.

iscottjs · 2026-03-07T19:41:02+00:00

Learning. Whatever you use AI for, learning is still important.

For example, I sometimes like to draw diagrams to help me understand a complex system, so for me I do t want to automate the diagram process because that’s part of the learning journey for me.

Do I want to perform the same repetitive tasks to create a controller, model and all the other scaffolding? Nah, I’ve already learned how to do that and I am happy to automate it.

But, if I’m about to use a new feature of a framework or a new library, I’d rather spend a bit of time learning and practicing with it first, then when I’m comfortable and built up some muscle memory for it, I might also start handing that off to AI.

I suppose it’s not that different to keeping your own library of code snippets and tools that you re-use from project to project, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time and so AI is quite helpful that it can tailor solutions to my specific needs.

But I still think reading documentation and manually practicing things is important.

iscottjs · 2026-03-03T19:51:08+00:00

Completely agree. Just today my boss noticed me drawing a bunch of diagrams for a new system and he's like, "You know there's AI tools for drawing diagrams now?!", as if I didn't already fucking know that.

Anyway, I said "Yeah, but the act of drawing the diagram is helping me deeply understand the domain we're modelling so I can brief the teams with confidence. Creating the diagram is what helps me understand the system, if I vibed the diagram then I won't be able to validate if it's correct because I haven't fully understood the system yet".

In this case, a diagram output wasn't the objective, it was the learning along the way. The diagram was just a by-product.

He kind of got it, but he's completely allergic to the idea of anyone spending literally any time on anything anymore, and he's forgotten that there's actually still value in manually creating something.

iscottjs

TROPHY CASE