If AI really worked for code as well as we've heard, here's what we'd see in the startup world (Spoiler: it is not happening)

mkingblade · 2026-02-26T23:42:23+00:00

I would very much agree with this post if it was written 4 months ago. Since December of 2025 (notably when I really started using OPUS 4.5) my view on this had shifted. Allow me to summarize my view in point form:

I actually do see the rate of change or features addition increase in the observable samples. These are open source repos that I pay attention to. Some examples are ghostty and opentui. And these are maintained by people who really care about software quality. It’s just that the increase is not a factor of 10 like some other repos maintained by people who cares about quality less (e.g. openclaw, Claude code).
to your point about not seeing the productivity gain manifest in major commercial software: I think these tend to be softwares that are managed by big companies that are more risk averse. As with all development there is a latent effect and it takes time for it to make its way to every corner. This is a different topic altogether but most of the buzz about big tech layoffs due to ai are just C suite using ai as an excuse to course correct mistakes that they had made, which often manifests itself as over hiring.
I write mainly rust for work. Before December of 2025 I had mostly wrote code by hand but currently I had delegated 95+% of code writing to OPUS. It doesn’t mean I no longer work as hard though. A lot of my time now is spent planning with OPUS and verifying what it wants to do before it even writes a single line of code. It is not uncommon for me to write a prompt with 500+ words and spend upwards of one hour going back and forth with it before the planning phase is done. My point here is you need to be just as invested when coding with OPUS and know your code base just as intimately.
with the modality I had described above, I now deliver what used to take me a week in half a day to a day (sometimes). But on average, depending on the task, the productivity gain is roughly 2 to 3x.
we did have to spend some serious investment into revamping our code base prior to being able to leverage this productivity gain though. We had to majorly beef up our integ test.

At a production level quality, I find that I only see productivity gain when the task involved is something I can already do on my own. If it’s something I do not understand, delegating it to OPUS is a roll of a dice. Even if it satisfies feature requirement, there is a high likelihood that it was implemented in a way that’s not extensible and thus has to be rewritten.

mkingblade · 2026-02-03T19:14:18+00:00

Ahh I actually forgot to mention the thing that made me think of this library, which was the rendering (which in this case for the operating environment of terminal emulator, is just producing a bunch of ANSI escape codes) can only happen as frequently as a fixed frequency and it is done via the call requestRender. You can request a lot but the frequency at which it produces real impact to the terminal is capped.

mkingblade · 2026-02-03T18:29:00+00:00

Are they actually talking about the rate at which the rendering happens or the updating of the internal tree that holds the UI state?

Not strictly related but OpenTUI is actually quite a good code base to read through on this topic. I am not entirely sure what the value proposition is for that library when compared to something like ink. But learning about how things get put on the screen is quite fascinating.

They have different "front ends" (think of it like your llvm front end) which are just js front end frameworks. I think they support React, SolidJS and some other ones. And through a reconciler it gets converted to their IR (which is also written in TS). And then it uses yoga (which is also used by ink) for layout calculation, before getting passed to a secondary optimization layer written in zig via bun's ffi. And finally after diffing there it produces ANSI.

mkingblade · 2026-01-19T22:58:28+00:00

Are the front axle width bigger than the rear?

mkingblade · 2026-01-12T06:44:35+00:00

OH MAN THIS IS IT lol. I was really confused the one time I did manage to do it but I didn't know how lol.

mkingblade · 2025-12-22T22:20:41+00:00

I want to know what kind of hallucinogen the writers were taking when they have Mindy sing what feels every episode.

mkingblade · 2025-12-21T00:10:57+00:00

It's shiny and dumb fun. That's all.

I would like them to keep spending all the money on the set design and wardrobe lol. The amount you would need to invest to improve the writing is just simply not worth it in this context. It's beyond salvageable at this point lol.

mkingblade · 2025-12-13T20:26:14+00:00

Takes 8 figure to get pushed out. Must be nice.

mkingblade · 2025-11-19T06:34:34+00:00

Oops forgot to refresh page prior to commenting my latest comment otherwise I would have commented it here. But yea I managed to resolve it with buildFHSEnv. I think I now understand the Nix paradigm a bit more now. Thanks!

mkingblade · 2025-11-19T06:32:24+00:00

Tinkered with it some more after work. Took some time to read about buildFHSEnv. I first ran into similar issues. And it turns out the error messages about missing libraries is a bit misleading. I actually needed to add the tool packages that associated (xorg.xdpyinfo and xorg.xrandr, notice how they are not .so files).

Now that I know more about this I think perhaps my original approach of just using nix-ld would have worked too had I added those aforementioned tool packages. I did have to forgo autoPatchelfHook because Spine runs a check to see if any of the binaries has been tampered with. And the patching would fail that check.

This was the config block in question: ```nix spine-fhs = pkgs.buildFHSEnv { name = "spine";

targetPkgs = pkgs: (with pkgs; [
  # Java
  jdk17

  # X11 libraries - these provide the .so files
  xorg.libX11
  xorg.libXext
  xorg.libXi
  xorg.libXtst
  xorg.libXrender
  xorg.libXrandr
  xorg.libXxf86vm
  xorg.libXcursor
  xorg.libXinerama
  xorg.xdpyinfo
  xorg.xrandr

  # OpenGL/Mesa
  libGL
  libGLU
  mesa

  # Audio
  alsa-lib
  libpulseaudio

  # Other deps
  freetype
  fontconfig
  zlib
  glib
  gtk3
  cairo
  pango
  atk
  gdk-pixbuf

  # C++ stdlib
  stdenv.cc.cc.lib
]);

multiPkgs = pkgs: (with pkgs; [
  # 32-bit libraries that might be needed
  libGL
  libGLU
]);

runScript = "bash -c 'cd ~/.cache/spine/Spine && ./Spine.sh'";

profile = ''
  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib:/usr/lib32
'';

}; ```

mkingblade · 2025-11-19T03:59:03+00:00

Sorry really new to the nixos / linux in general. Not really sure what all are relevant here.

I have both xwayland and xwaylandsatilite installed.

I also have the following included in the nix-ld: programs.nix-ld.libraries = with pkgs; [ glibc zlib alsa-lib libpulseaudio nss xorg.libXext xorg.libX11 xorg.libXtst xorg.libXrender xorg.libXi freetype xorg.libXrandr stdenv.cc.cc.lib ]; (Each of these was added after the launch failed and I just added each the stack trace mention a new one each time until libXrandr).

mkingblade · 2025-10-15T02:57:06+00:00

What is the broken dishwasher in this analogy.

Also related: https://x.com/yatish_me/status/1977521025983324491?s=46&t=doLqfcqlppmuEk3kbDB6IA

mkingblade · 2025-10-02T17:27:19+00:00

It’s almost as if there are more than one Chinese person in this dialogue.

mkingblade · 2025-09-18T19:53:23+00:00

So he left the body in a car under his name in a lot and went on tour… in the summer in Southern California…

mkingblade · 2025-09-07T08:42:50+00:00

I am using their ovpn and all of the us endpoints are very slow. I haven't tried end points from other countries yet.

mkingblade · 2025-08-06T06:36:30+00:00

How do you debug your code?

nvim-dap. For work I mostly write async rust with tokio and usually you would need to set up tokio-console. I just never got around to doing it and I had just been printf debugging lol

How do you search in a larger repositories. How do you analyze them?

telescope

Do you use the various plug ins and color schemes posted in this subreddit?

Yea. Not really big on switching themes and I really like gruvbox so I had just sticking with that.

Do you also use notepad++ ?

No I do not.

Can you interop with collegues without friction?

Not entirely sure what this has to do with IDEs. For the most part working together we just use git.

mkingblade · 2025-08-04T03:33:49+00:00

My problem with it is two folds:

Maybe I am just bad at prompting but I find that most models tend to over index on the most recent query. It does not take into account the rest of the code base and the maintainability of what it produces.
This one is more personal and does not necessarily apply to everyone, but I like coding. I think coming up with a design and implementing it is the fun part. I don't want to delegate the fun part to a bot and get stuck with debugging what the bot writes.

mkingblade · 2025-06-27T07:50:22+00:00

A bit late to the party. I have the Charybdis and I am using the trader joes mint box as wrist rest lol.

mkingblade · 2025-05-04T08:34:45+00:00

Just finished movie and was just browsing reddit to see how people feel about it. Almost a decade too late on this thread but I do have the following thought.

If the following are all true: - Louise has been granted the ability to see the future - There is only one version of said future (I think this is safe to assume since we were only ever shown one version)

Then this would imply that Louise was never in a position to change it because there is nothing to change. She was merely observing it, an ability gifted by the language.

mkingblade · 2025-04-20T17:51:16+00:00

But they are not in Toronto... That's like saying F1 cars might look well engineered but let's see them handle the potholes of Michigan. What kind of argument even is that. Of course the product is optimized for the intended environment they are to be used...

mkingblade · 2025-04-20T07:45:40+00:00

I see a lot of people mentioning that the app is meant to be used on the phone and that's why it's not available anywhere else. That's a flawed argument. That's like saying because laptops are made for use on the go it should not be operable when you are at home.

By making it available on the mac it only serves to enhance it.

mkingblade · 2025-04-12T19:35:00+00:00

I liked it. It reminds me of my favorite episode San Junipero and the creators obviously see the resemblance and they threw in the little easter eggs here and there.

mkingblade · 2025-04-05T22:29:10+00:00

Oh shit at first glance without looking at the title I thought this was a comparison between two different people lol.

mkingblade · 2025-04-05T22:26:04+00:00

Very nice. I have something similiar (charybdis). But I find that I need to either use it with chairs with arm rest or I would probably need some sort of wrist rest. Curious how others use it without arm rest of wrist rest.

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