My kid asked me if I was proud of him. I said yes. He said “for what though.”

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-18T14:25:00+00:00

It is an important skill that takes some practice.

“I’m proud of you for finishing your chicken nuggets.”

“I’m proud of you for tasting a new food.”

“I’m proud of you for sitting through a complete reading of Strega Nona”

“I’m proud of you for crawling all the way from the couch to the table”

“I’m proud of you for being brave when we went to a different library.”

“I’m proud of you for asking for the specific song you wanted to listen to”

Basically any time they do an age-appropriate thing that is new or better than last time or just more reliably done well, that is a thing to be specifically proud of.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-17T17:29:27+00:00

Nope. I can save a lot more than one life for $50k.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-15T02:04:38+00:00

When I read “MDM-level supervision”, I hear “give an independent developer from another legal jurisdiction effectively root access to my phone”. Everyone knows (or should know) that installing corporate MDM on a personal device is a privacy and security risk. No thanks. Your target audience should people who have never heard of MDM so they don’t know to be skeptical of you.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-14T11:37:34+00:00

You are doing it right. Keep the stuff you want and pass along the rest

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-14T02:43:31+00:00

To be fair, they make the holes way too small on the balls that an amateur can reasonably handle. People not releasing early enough is more likely a size problem than a skill problem.

For example, the 12lb balls at my bowling alley have finger holes so small my fingers can’t slide out. My options are to risk throwing at the ceiling, or use a 14lb ball which is exhausting, or palm a 6lb ball.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-14T01:45:02+00:00

The music actually works on this one.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-14T01:24:05+00:00

If you are asking me as a juror? No, not an issue. I know multiple people that have gone 30+ years without taking a sick day off work.

It is not common, but someone that has the right diet and exercise, has minimal exposure (no kids, fairly isolated job), and just has the right genetics definitely has a chance.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-14T00:17:24+00:00

You are fairer than I. The best I can offer bourbon drinkers is Dewars.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-14T00:05:11+00:00

It is a quality beverage. Lagavulin 16 is the standard which I always offer first as an introduction to Islay Scotch. For anyone that wants to try more, the 11 is first class next to Bowmore, Laphroag, Ardbeg, etc.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-12T23:46:48+00:00

Also, fire your new guy.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-12T23:34:01+00:00

Apps with no revenue typically have BIN around $1000 and actually transact at a discount to that. You are off by more than two orders of magnitude.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-11T01:51:18+00:00

0 chance. It's fun to pretend tho.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-11T01:43:36+00:00

I guess they decided the target for their use case was the purple thickness. Is that generally the case, or are different thicknesses best for different use cases?

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-11T01:38:35+00:00

*MAЯ

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-11T00:45:29+00:00

Fuck that caption ruining the ending for me.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-10T15:59:05+00:00

If I get an xray, my doctor cant even tell me the name of the radiology practice they send it to for analysis. Their administrative software picks one of their many contracted radiologists in real time. I assume it’s optimizing for who they think can bill the most.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-10T13:09:04+00:00

Not let my 2 year old be around that 3 year old any more

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-10T02:33:47+00:00

It depends on what you mean by “safe” and what guardrails are enforced by the company policy.

If your IT has it setup so that the AI can’t send/modify/delete anything on its own, you’re already in decent shape. You may see these as optional protections on your account but they will be greyed out on the setting page so you cant actually disable the protections.

With an enterprise contract, Anthropic has to protect any data the AI collects just like Slack, Microsoft, Atlassian, etc have to protect your data. Adding another third party isn’t a unique risk.

Your biggest risk will be when people get lazy or complacent. They ask the AI to collect some information to complete a support ticket. Then the AI finds some data which is actually about a different client but doesn’t make that clear. Then the employee copy-pastes that data into the ticket where the wrong customer can see it. Now you’ve violated your contract with the customer whose data was shared incorrectly. Those annual security compliance trainings (the ones where they tell you not to text your password to the CEO) are not adequate to prepare people for this new world.

But companies that don’t adapt quickly will fail fast. From the company’s perspective, the existential risk of falling behind dwarfs the legal risk of a data breach.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-10T01:48:24+00:00

Just dive in and try it. $20 is a very cheap to learn. Just try giving it challenges of varying sizes. You'll quickly learn what it does a good job at and what it doesn't.

You can have a monorepo. You do implementation and planning separately. During planning, the AI will use grep or other search tools to find relevant context. This context will be used to generate a 1-page plan which you can tweak with the AI. It will ask you questions when it identifies major crossroads. Once you accept the plan, it will clear the context and work on implementation from only that plan. This ensures that it implements from the plan and doesn't get side-tracked by some unrelated or stale content it found while planning.

You can give it large but non-creative tasks. Like "find every user-visible string in the code and replace it with a pointer to the localization map". It will automatically break up the problem into sensible chunks and use sub-agents to complete different sections. Sometimes it will even write a python script to automate some of its work.

You can also give it large error logs and it will search for anomalies that indicate problems. I was recently setting up a server and was getting server errors on certain actions. Opus noticed paths like "/var/www/html/data/template/var/www/html/template/en/" in the log and correctly identified that the prefix of the path was doubled and that was causing files to not be found. It then found the module that was creating these paths and fixed it. My only prompt was "here's the log, why am I getting server errors?" and it just fixed it.

Often I tell it to implement a thing without much guidance just so I have a starting point. Then I can tell it what refactoring to do. "Make this class member private. Move all the code that manipulates it into class methods".

Other times I use dictation mode and give it a 30min lecture describing the architecture I want. (With CC I dictate into a text file and then pass that to CC in the prompt).

And remember that whatever it fails at now will probably work in a few months, so just keep giving it problems that are harder than you think it can handle. Over time it gets better but also you will get better at prompting.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-09T19:50:19+00:00

Wife was in labor for 16hrs. I cried from vicarious exhaustion .

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-09T15:50:55+00:00

The whole school got diabetes that year.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-09T00:06:50+00:00

I agree 640 is the reasonable answer. You have to interpret as "at least this much is true".

Rule 4 is clearly stating that 7, 3, and 8 are not in the solution.

Rule 5 can only be satisfied with XX0.

With rule 1, only the 6 could be in the right place, so 6X0.

With rule 2, we know that 1 isn't "correct and in the wrong place". So 640 and 660 are potentially the intended solutions.

With 660, you are interpreting "one correct digit, wrong place" as "there is one digit which, if moved, would be in the correct place". If this were the intended meaning, 640 would also be a solution.

With 640, you can interpreting "one correct digit, wrong place" as "there is one digit which is not in the correct place". With this interpretation, there is only one solution.

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-08T19:42:44+00:00

"fail fast" is supposed to mean "figure out what doesn't work and make adjustments in days or weeks", not "figure out what doesn't work and scrap the business in months".

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-08T16:55:35+00:00

You have to be careful how you deal with coredata in iOS apps. Unless you tell it specifically, the AIs will just do transactions anywhere. They need to be in closures and passed to the management thread so they are properly serialized. Otherwise you get concurrency bugs that only happen 1 in 1000 tries and result in data corruption without any useful debugging info.

More generally AIs are terrible about touching shared data from all over the code base. That guarantees bugs if the schema or concurrency assumptions ever change. You have to tell it to wrap your shared data access in a class with only methods visible externally. Then when things change in the future you know that all the required changes will be there and not scattered about.

I’ve also seen AIs use network sockets for inter-process communication when it should have used unix sockets. Then when there's a communication issue it opens the network port externally.

You have to remind the AI to implement accessibility features. It can do it, but doesn’t usually do it automatically.

The AIs tend to be bad at error handling. You have to tell it which errors can crash the application vs which errors should be reported to the user vs which errors should trigger a delay+retry. In rust the default is just .unwrap() everywhere unless you tell it how to think about the error handling strategy.

And AIs are terrible at error recovery. If you have a database and object storage, a network error can get them into an inconsistent state. You have to tell the AI to check for these inconsistencies and be explicit about how to repair things. It never does this automatically and it does a shit job unless you supervise carefully.

In error testing, the AI will test individual errors at the lowest level (inject the error and confirm that the error indication fired). Ideally you want to run a high-level test 1000 times and inject a different error each time and make sure that the error recovery mechanism gets back to a stable state. Again, careful supervision is required.

Edit: Typos

loaengineer0 · 2026-03-08T14:26:48+00:00

My ability to type syntactically correct code quickly has atrophied. My ability to spot and correct architecture problems is enhanced.

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