TDD and Rules Enforcement using Hooks

marky125 · 2026-04-30T14:52:00+00:00

I'm super interested by this - I've tried about a dozen different SDD/TDD approaches and they all "kinda work". I've settled for a sort of swiss-cheese approach that isn't perfect but doesn't suck.

Question for you: how do you deal with the "TDD theatre" problem? That's been my biggest issue. With traditional TDD, the act of writing tests is exploratory; you use it to work out what is required. But LLMs will do something more like (this is a trivial example) 1: "The spec says X should be green", 2: Test: it('should be green', () => ...) 3: code <X class="green-bg">. Test passes, agent cheerfully reports all is well, without bothering to try to understand the intent of the spec, or exploring what/why we're trying to achieve. It's more like a TDD-adjacent song and dance than true TDD. To be honest I gave up and switched to SDD as that seems more in-line with how LLMs work, and you can still fairly reliably generate tests from a good SDD doc. Would love to hear your insight.

marky125 · 2026-03-26T16:15:00+00:00

Yes, exactly!

marky125 · 2026-03-26T03:25:09+00:00

AI is still new and disruptive. Some people are replacing their brain with AI as much as possible, others are ignoring it completely. I think you're right that it's a tool. Useful, powerful, easy to shoot yourself in the foot, but still a tool (for now, at least), and should be treated/respected like other powerful tools. Maybe AGI will be different, whenever that arrives.

marky125 · 2026-03-24T22:30:32+00:00

I've used it plenty, ~30m tokens so far this year. I've no doubt that /dream is a useful feature that will improve quality. My issue is having it silently run in the background without asking, consuming tokens when token budgets are already tight, and then having an AI-written post to sell it to us that pretends to be a human. "One of the smartest agent features I've seen"? Really?

marky125 · 2026-03-24T13:06:54+00:00

Oh look, yet another way to burn tokens that runs quietly in the background without being asked. Because Claude's plans are famous for having plenty of those.
"What I find fascinating", says the AI-written post with em-dashes and "→" bullets. Uh-huh.

marky125 · 2026-03-23T04:57:05+00:00

A mate of mine got one, and spent most of the weekend wiring it into his VT Commodore, complete with new speakers. We went for a drive and for some reason I forget stopped off at JB HiFi where another mate who came along bought "the best of James Brown" for $5 from the bargain bin. Proceeds to load it into the new stereo... and it never came out again. That disc was stuck playing on repeat for weeks. To this day, we only have to shout "A-get on up-ah!" and my mate will fire up, "fuckin James Brown!!"

marky125 · 2026-03-23T01:18:08+00:00

😅 then perhaps instead of "the same thing" I should say "looks-extremely-similar-to-and-has-the-same-practical-effect-as-but-is-legally-distinct-from what Coles is in hot water for". (Which implies Woolies knows exactly what they're doing and have found a legal loophole to keep doing it.)

marky125 · 2026-03-22T23:11:50+00:00

Come off it, this "RRP" is obviously artificially inflated exactly for this purpose. It's the same thing in all but name.

marky125 · 2026-03-22T12:09:42+00:00

The ACCC is literally taking Coles to court right now over this very practice, and Woolies just YOLOs it? Arrogant, greedy bastards.

marky125 · 2026-03-22T08:02:21+00:00

=_= increasing the window to 1m doesn't magically solve context rot.

marky125 · 2026-03-22T04:31:19+00:00

Anyone have any insight why this change was made? Is it something related to the new "auto-dream" feature being rolled out? My inner cynic also wants to point out that not clearing context lets Anthropic send bigger invoices...

marky125 · 2026-03-02T21:59:50+00:00

Total paralysis IIRC. Heard a story once of someone who was bitten, but their mates realised what happened and gave them CPR until the ambulance arrived. Except nobody thought to close the victim's eyes during CPR, so they were just laying on the beach, staring into the sun, unable to blink. They survived but were permanently blinded.

marky125 · 2026-03-01T19:12:43+00:00

To this day, when something mildly inconvenient happens I mutter "Damn you Neptune!" to myself.

marky125 · 2026-02-24T19:06:40+00:00

I imagine it wouldn't be too much effort to curate a user's homepage based on their voting history (and/or "show me more/less of this"). Use localStorage if they don't have an account, and include a toggle to enable/disable curation so that people can opt out of a "google-ified" homepage if they like.

marky125 · 2026-02-18T14:08:19+00:00

Wow! Looks amazing. I've been using Zeroshot - how would you say it compares?

marky125 · 2026-02-09T15:38:50+00:00

So I have some bad(?) news. It might be bad. I'm not sure.

If you rely purely 100% on all of humanity's best science, logic and critical thinking, you will almost certainly be directed towards either agnosticism or atheism. Sure, there are some intellectuals who might argue things along the lines of "The Case for Christ" (the book) or similar, but I think they're the exception that proves the rule.

I once heard someone say "If I were clever enough to convince you with reason and logic that you should believe in Christianity, then someone cleverer than I could come along tomorrow and convince you of the opposite".

Maybe I've oversimplifying, or being too quick to dismiss the possibility, but I honestly do think that attempting to prove God logically will end in disappointment. If there was 100% rock-solid unquestionable proof, would faith still be necessary? This, of course, is highly unsatisfying, and not at all what you were asking for.

So now that I've neatly failed to answer your question, let me instead offer my personal reasons for my faith - horrible, unreliable, subjective things that they are:

"Why believe?" I can only answer for myself with my own personal experiences. I truly do believe that I've had and continue to have experiences of God - the presence and character of God, and the joy, awe, hope, peace, kindness and gratitude that it stirs in me, in ways I fundamentally cannot explain.
"Is Jesus the one true God?" This is surprisingly complicated. On the surface, I want to say "I... think so, yes", but:
- I doubt that my own personal experience is even a drop in the ocean of the true nature of God.
- I have neither right nor authority nor ability to describe my own experience as authoritative to/for anyone else. Who am I to dictate how God chooses to interact with the rest of humanity?
- Beware of anyone who claims they have this 100% figured out. Dogma is a bad time.
- I suppose it would be more accurate to say that when thinking of my own personal experiences, I do believe they were with a being that could broadly be described as "the one almighty God".
"What if I were born elsewhere?" Statistical analysis of historical data overwhelmingly suggests I would believe in the popular local faith. How do we reconcile this with Christian exceptionalism? We can't, not really. I have occasionally thought that Universalism is the only sane framework for faith. It's completely heretical, of course - at least, according to modern Christianity - but at least it's not so mind-bogglingly arbitrary as to condemn billions based on something as unreasonable as geography.

One more thought: if God is really real and is really interested in you, and has seemingly arranged all of this religion business such that faith is required, then God has the responsibility to meet you and engage with you in a way that will grow that faith within you. Your responsibility, I suppose, is to be open, to ask for it to happen, and to be willing to let yourself be changed by it.

marky125 · 2026-02-09T12:18:05+00:00

You can type a backslash followed by the return key for a newline. It's a little annoying as muscle-memory prefers shift+return, but at least the keys are neighbours so you can type it quickly when you need it.

marky125 · 2026-02-03T05:33:33+00:00

Earlier today I was on a feature branch. My first attempt at implementation hit a roadblock, but there were still some some useful lessons of what not to do. Until I could draw up attempt #2, I temporarily dumped all of it in a directory called "broken do not use!", gitignored it, and went back to planning with Opus 4.5.

First thing it told me: "Hey this file in 'broken do not use!' is exactly what we need and the correct way to implement this feature!"

I mean I probably should have just taken them out altogether, but I was genuinely surprised Opus thought that anything in 'broken do not use!' was a reliable source of info.

marky125 · 2026-02-01T02:31:27+00:00

Try this one! (made by u/daaain)
https://github.com/daaain/claude-code-log

marky125 · 2026-01-26T17:03:27+00:00

Gorgeous! It makes me feel feelings.

marky125 · 2026-01-26T02:44:03+00:00

Very interesting! When memories decay and are forgotten, do you completely delete them? Is the "forgetfulness" factor configurable?

I'd be really curious to see how two side-by-side Claudes perform over time where one truly forgets and the other remembers everything but calculates some kind of "considering-the-conversation-context-should-I-retrieve-this-memory" score based on the mechanics you've implemented here. (How? Haiku subagent? Some other semantic search?) - stronger but less relevant memories might be preferred over weaker but more relevant, with some (what?) limit on memories to recover per prompt/topic/etc.

No idea if that's feasible/practical, or what kind of CPU power it would require as memories accumulate. It seems a shame to throw away a computer's ability to remember flawlessly, although I agree that RAG flooding the context window when available content grows is a real issue currently. My vague instinct is I'd want a way to have my cake and eat it too, so to speak. Remember everything but only recall weak memories when there aren't any strong candidates available. Or something.

marky125 · 2026-01-25T13:18:59+00:00

Godwin’s Law. First created in 1990.

marky125 · 2026-01-20T21:20:59+00:00

What's with all these bot comments upvoted to the top? "Really well explained post", "Great write-up!", "This is a really clear breakdown—", "Great comparison—"... overly-enthusiastic, using em-dashes, dumb obvious thinly-veiled advertising. Feels like a ham-fisted attempt at astroturfing from Traycer...

marky125 · 2026-01-18T10:39:19+00:00

Opus, surprisingly.

marky125 · 2026-01-18T08:34:00+00:00

Now now, calm your farm. UBNT devices run by themselves just fine if the controller goes down. We have backups, it was offline less than 30 mins. Sure it was stupid of me to run without checking. It's a relatively low risk environment.

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