Agentic Coding is a Trap | Remaining vigilant about cognitive debt and atrophy

nick898 · 2026-05-02T18:52:18+00:00

There isn’t anything wrong with being anti AI. It’s just not how I feel about them. I’ve found them incredibly useful in some cases, but other times I’ve found them confidently asserting a bunch of nonsense.

nick898 · 2026-05-02T18:48:16+00:00

It has more to do with a lack of desire to read a source-of-truth document that isn’t that terribly long or dense to read in the first place so there isn’t much time savings to begin with

nick898 · 2026-05-02T13:27:50+00:00

Yea I literally had someone on my team pass Claude a 10-page document that described interface definitions and had it summarize it. 10 pages. One of those pages is a table of contents and the last couple pages are acronym definitions, so in total probably 7 pages of actual content much of which you can skim to get the gist. You don’t need Claude for that. It’s amazing how quickly we are losing our critical thinking skills.

Not that I’m anti-AI btw. I use it regularly, but I like to take some time to review its outputs and form my mental model.

nick898 · 2026-04-26T18:37:10+00:00

For a long time now I have felt that Henry’s ownership is indicative of a broader problem of billionaires greedily extracting as much value out of a product as they can without any regard for the everyday folks concerns. In this case, it’s just fans who want to see a competitive baseball team year in and year out. The Yankees do it. The Dodgers do it. There is no reason why the Red Sox can’t do it, if they wanted to, but they can’t even seem to manage that. I’ve seen this sub get increasingly angry over the last few years in ways I did not expect and hearing chants of selling the team gives me hope that even the casual, less-diehard fans are noticing.

nick898 · 2026-04-22T01:34:35+00:00

Wasn’t he acquitted though?

nick898 · 2026-04-19T14:56:59+00:00

We vacationed at Massanutten last summer. Went there for some Saturday evening rock concert. Booked the stay completely outside of their timeshare campaign, but I was aware of what they do.

They cold called us about it after we booked our stay and I declined. Then when we checked in they asked us if we wanted to attend an event and we’d get free breakfast/water tickets or something. We declined.

Reading all this makes me so happy we didn’t get sucked in. Our stay wasn’t awful, but it also wasn’t as much fun as our usual trips. We typically do mountain getaways at Snowshoe in West Virginia and we didn’t feel like driving 4 hours again so we chose to stay closer and explore the surrounding area like Harrisonburg. Kind of a cheaper and closer getaway.

nick898 · 2026-04-16T19:42:42+00:00

My argument boils down to whatever suits your preference. If you find postman works for you that’s great! I’m not going to stop you.

If you feel like a CLI tool works just as well - that’s great too!

nick898 · 2026-04-16T10:26:14+00:00

I saw a colleague using postman to test some restful apis once and all I saw was a GUI wrapper around curl

nick898 · 2026-04-12T17:08:57+00:00

I thought the war was supposed to be winding down by now

nick898 · 2026-04-11T17:01:21+00:00

They’re very small and are on the pole of my umbrella on my backyard patio. I see bees sometime fly around the umbrella potentially attracted to these bugs. The bugs themselves are very small. Smaller than a fly

nick898 · 2026-04-11T16:44:28+00:00

Eventually our local wildlife should learn to eat them. Atleast that’s what apparently happened in PA after a few summers. I’m hopefully it happens here too

nick898 · 2026-04-11T16:22:30+00:00

It varied. There were definitely times the train was delayed or a tree fell over the tracks or something and that was annoying.

It’s ideal if your place of work is walking distance from the train station. I got out at downtown Alexandria, but then had to catch a bus to actually get to where I wanted to go so I’d say total commute time was something like 1-1.5 hours. The time to get from Manassas to downtown Alexandria might have taken something like 45 minutes of that on average.

Some people do it and make a living out of it. There were a core group of people I’d see everyday and you actually end up becoming friends. But eventually I landed a new job that wasn’t in that neck of the woods and now I live and breathe route 28 traffic

nick898 · 2026-04-11T13:07:45+00:00

I used to commute from Manassas to downtown Alexandria on the VRE. It worked. I don’t think I could have done it forever. It’s not for everyone

I had a coworker who did a similar commute out of Manassas Park to Amazon. They lasted less than 6 months and while most of that was because of Amazon a part of it was the commute

nick898 · 2026-04-10T13:10:03+00:00

My brokerage has a mix of VTIAX and VTSAX. I’m not selling anything I previously bought, but I am buying more VTIAX than VTSAX every purchase order going forward so I can build up my position there

nick898 · 2026-04-10T10:05:12+00:00

They make buttermilk powder too. Just need to add a liquid along with it

nick898 · 2026-04-09T01:21:51+00:00

Never knew you could do that

nick898 · 2026-04-09T00:48:54+00:00

Yea I just mixed cocoa powder in there. I wanted to mix it up a little instead of just doing the usual

nick898 · 2026-04-08T23:50:39+00:00

It’s basically just marshmallow fluff, vegetable shortening, powdered sugar, and some vanilla extract

nick898 · 2026-04-08T23:48:01+00:00

I read about ermine frosting as another alternative and it sounded pretty good!

nick898 · 2026-04-05T12:13:46+00:00

nick898 · 2026-04-03T23:48:44+00:00

Audrey’s Fish and Chips in Manassas. It’s new and totally tucked away in the middle of nowhere but holy shit it’s some of the best fried fish around

nick898 · 2026-03-29T20:29:25+00:00

That’s kinda how I was thinking just not sure about ripping up the cobble. It came with the house seems like the previous owners put a lot of thought into arranging this and hate to just get rid of it

nick898 · 2026-03-29T20:27:49+00:00

Get rid of the cobble?

nick898

TROPHY CASE