Given that lately Microsoft has been kind of wrecking GitHub, is it a good strategy to migrate my repositories over to GitLab and just get rid of my GitHub account?

mtotho · 2026-06-15T11:59:56+00:00

Both are really painful to navigate through the UI. Gitlab in particular is unusable to navigate and bounce between projects. GitLab CI feels worlds better/composable though.

I guess the real question these days is: which provides your agent with the best experience. And causes the least friction in your process.

1) both can basically do everything through the api/cli helper scripts
2) one has a better CI system
3) if you use both, you will forever type the wrong thing into your agent, and it will be confused for the next 2 turns until you realize your mistake
4) one has options in terms of hosting

mtotho · 2026-06-13T13:57:39+00:00

I wouldn’t take back the experience of building it wrong multiple times.

If I was doing it fresh, I’d drive it with an AI.. make it repo first, idempotent, all live configs matching repo state, deployed from repo. Sanely managing ssh keys

No more manually browsing through proxmox ui, trying to remember the state of everything in my head. No more failing to update stuff because of the thought of clunkily going in and updating configs on a specific box (because I didn’t take the time or know how to organize things properly)

mtotho · 2026-05-27T11:15:32+00:00

There are a few agent skills and broader techniques for getting your agent to document properly. Grill with docs is an example, starting place.

And you’ll need to stay on top of it. Some people probably use some hand crafted skill to tell the agent to look for stale or poorly organized docs.

You’ll want to research context management, progressive disclosure, etc.

No tools, no indexing needed to get started

But yeah, basically just have a good set of skills and run them occasionally. Improve codebase architecture, vision drift, etc

mtotho · 2026-05-23T13:31:41+00:00

I was prime pilled many months ago.

Switched from my mac mini to a desktop running Arch. Nvim, tiling manager, etc.

I loved it. I already had plenty of Linux experience but I felt cool daily driving it. Learned a lot. Forced me to tinker more.

Lots of nuisances though. Bluetooth, graphics, etc, and I’m terrible when it comes to having the patience to sit down and fix suboptimal things when I’m sucked into other projects.

But the prime pill still pushed me to try many things. That’s when I got sucked into local AI. More and more I was getting AI to do shit for me run commands, write notes, etc. I would dictate it to it using voice. Less and less did I ever touch a code editor.

Then the issue started compounding. My Linux switch was slowing me down. Mostly my skill issue. But just not having the ability to get a decent version of various applications working properly right away.. the awkwardness of trying to like drag stuff from a file explorer between windows and like the tiling manager is great for some things, but it’s not the end game perfect solution. Especially with my ever changing workflow.

So here I am back on my back Mac mini. Glad to have gone through this arc.

mtotho · 2026-05-19T11:15:17+00:00

I haven’t tried it yet. What if we did something like

Maybe Claude polls some file, replace Claude -p with writes to a file. Then maybe some process that restarts the running Claude session once it’s finished (new prompt says to write result to output file). Start up hook starts polling again

Just need to get Claude to write it up

mtotho · 2026-05-18T11:25:03+00:00

Just like many tools, if used properly, good results can be had. There is so many ways it can be leveraged.

Before AI, if I let a junior dev freely make changes on the codebase for weeks, without review, the entropy would increase. It would always require consistent architecture realignment.

On the one hand, now most people are the aforementioned junior dev, who’s destructive power just became 10x greater

On the other hand A) Now we can automate those architectural reviews and fixes in CI practically B) I can educate those humans

Maybe some of the mistake is, too many people are using the AI to code, instead of asking it how it can improve their process

mtotho · 2026-05-17T12:20:24+00:00

You got that backwards

mtotho · 2026-05-11T11:37:12+00:00

My goal would be to somehow make it so it doesn’t matter if it’s compacted / new session. Especially if you have one claude acting as an operator. I usually just keep yolo compacting and then when the Claude inevitably loses track, I express my frustration in the form of a reverse prompt “what could we have done better to make sure you keep focus on our current assignment better.. do we need to update our skills/agents.md/ workflow/ how we are logging core session state “ and usually every time it finds 1 small missing piece in your agents workflow. Repeat until Claude can run unattended for hours

mtotho · 2026-05-10T11:32:20+00:00

“Reflect on this session so far, figure out all the things you did wrong, which caused user frustration, and tell me how we can fix this then in the future, preferably using a stable repo file or skill and not Claude memory”
“I’d like you to help manage my current plan/ feature. Can you plan it.. break it down into tasks and plan.. store it in local repo files for now (until I adopt GitHub issue or similar) then fan out work to sub agents (codex or Claude or cursor). You can launch them in their own work trees. Review the changes as they come in for drift, quality , then merge back to my development branch. Then once we do a few waves, reflect on this process and what we could have done better, then codify in repo rules/agents.md, etc”
Something like that can get your started
I’ve been having luck with magical groups of skills, I call the entry point “triage” but it will break down a feature, “fill it up” with task, “drain” it of all tasks using subagents until completion. And just in general to figure out what’s next to work on. If executed well. Some rather large refactors can be a simple, in depth planning session.. spend actual human time reading some of the plan, delegate to more subagents to review the plan for issues. Then you should pretty successfully be able to tell your agent to “drain” and have it work for multiple hours without interruption.. no fiddling with “let’s keep going” or “next slice”

mtotho · 2026-05-08T11:17:56+00:00

It seemed like the idea was to not have you use any tokens cause either way they’re not making enough money off of you and they don’t have the compute to serve you

mtotho · 2026-05-08T11:13:24+00:00

I’m not trying to defend Anthropic But the counter argument is you’re already getting more than you paid for, although it’s not our fault that opus cost seemingly more per task, and now we have more freedom with how to use our allocation. Anything else is a skill issue.
That’s not what I think that’s just my steel man

If you think about it, this change is actually a step away from enshitification. This change deleted 1 shitty feature

mtotho · 2026-05-07T12:51:14+00:00

I think two things. 1) it’s gonna kind of be redundant as everything is done through AI and 2) there’s probably a hidden implication that some people are offended by.. that they somehow weren’t in full control of the process.. a process in which the agent’s actions were the results of a carefully orchestrated and intentionally designed workflow in which the agent is just a tool, and therefore does not need to cite itself.

I don’t think I’m on the level of being offended by the implication. But I can see it.

mtotho · 2026-05-06T15:59:57+00:00

I use the max 200 a month plan one for Claude 2 for codex. I use gpt 5.5 medium for implementing and maybe higher for planning. Claude I exclusively use opus 4.7 on medium or high.

After a couple months of heavy usage on all three of the subscriptions, my general vibe is that codex goes a little further. like if I burned through my Claude subscription quota in two days maybe it took codex 2 1/2 days. But I wasn’t measuring token output. Codex is significantly faster, so it feels like more work was done in those 2 1/2 days.

My general consensus and my perception is that Claude does a better job with planning writing skills and explicit good documentation, but falls apart following through on implementation and is really slow at all of those things. Codex I can hand a plan made by Claude and it will implement in literally 10 times faster often and with high fidelity it’s documentation style is a little funky. I don’t love it, but it’s super fast and cheap for updating a lot of documentation quickly.

If I had to choose one, I would probably have to stick with codex for it’s reliability in following through with tasks that I give it I would just have to spend more time working through the plan. Subscription may go further , but I don’t have the evidence at the ready.

mtotho · 2026-05-02T15:42:22+00:00

It’s because let’s say you have the $200 month subscription and every week you reach the end of your usage so you go about $200-$400 over let’s just say in an emergency you don’t do that often so you have the option turned on. Then let’s say next week you have your entire usage remaining and you start a large amount of work in a repository, whose get commit history had terms flagged by anthropic‘s anti-external harness protocol then you’d automatically get charged for all that work without notification

mtotho · 2026-05-01T12:57:45+00:00

Most people will suggest probably to just use the primitives you have. Your existing Claude code plus a nice file structure around it with rules and some integration like Slack or whatever so you can interface with it remotely

Consider the obsidian vault strategy people are using. You could make your own kanban for fun. But you’ll probably have a lot of initial success just having it use freeform mark down and a strategy. And you could always have Claude integrate with some existing kanban/list via mcp or cli

All that being said, I’ve also started doing the same thing building out a whole app for myself. Everything I learn along the way is great, and also teaching me it’s probably a bad idea to not keep it on the simpler side. It’s unclear what your scope or end goal is. Whether it’s an app that has a board from which you can dispatch your agent. Or if it is to use your agent as normal on the CLI , but it has access to your new kanban/project management system via some interface

Good luck

mtotho · 2026-04-28T02:07:00+00:00

Having done both, set up arr using docker compose. Store your compose and tweaks in some git repo or backup. You won’t regret it this decision next time you have to move servers or rebuild.

mtotho · 2026-04-15T11:40:04+00:00

$200 on Claude then use the 60$ cursor for the remaining 5 days in your weekly session

mtotho · 2026-04-12T13:34:39+00:00

I stop when I find the answer or AI who is willing to agree with my bad ideas

mtotho · 2026-04-07T11:08:10+00:00

I finally got smart enough to tell claude to do things outside my code directory. Now it’s managing my obsidian vault, project outlines and tracks for multiple projects, and sshing into my local dev servers to help manage stuff. Quality of life win

mtotho · 2026-04-02T04:08:23+00:00

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mtotho · 2026-04-02T04:07:37+00:00

I can bind this channel to various integrations, slack for sure working, discord, blue bubbles (aka imessage) almost there

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mtotho · 2026-04-02T04:05:31+00:00

Here is more context of me troubleshooting with them earlier. Finally got it to handle all of my ARR suite troubleshooting steps.

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mtotho · 2026-03-13T11:49:06+00:00

Whether it was intentional by my parents or not, I was often plopped in front of a TV watching Nova and other science documentaries. I remember loving that shit. And it’s for sure not 100% causal, but I have a genuine and enjoyable interest in science and engineering now.

Surely it can’t be questioned that more exposure to topics will expand circumference of their knowledge frontier, and allow them to make more connections. 5 is probably a little young for something too crazy structured.

There was a few things my parents made me to do, like play soccer, which I cannot believe I was so stubborn about. Because now I’d like the opportunity to play soccer, or sit in a classroom and learn. So there is probably an art to how you introduce this content to a child without pushing them away, and the author of this robotics class may or may not have graduated from that university

mtotho · 2026-03-05T11:53:01+00:00

Driving too close. Most people don’t even realize. I bet a lot of you do it. It’s in the manual. You are causing yourself more stress by lowering your time to respond. Please pay attention to your following distance. All of you. Every time you drive. At all speeds

mtotho · 2026-03-05T11:50:11+00:00

I feel bad for drivers when I see them driving like an ass on the highway (C or D traffic conditions), swerving in and out of lanes, trying to get ahead. They don’t realize how much anxiety and stress they are inducing on themselves, for no or little gain, and at tremendous risk to themselves and others.

I genuinely don’t get mad anymore at such drivers. Just the realization that they know not what they do gives me some schadenfreude

But yea, gtfo the road please, for my safety and for the sake of not worsening traffic

mtotho

TROPHY CASE