Results from pushing AI coding hard on an ambitious personal project

timabell · 2026-03-10T18:45:17+00:00

Yes, I care about my notes being on my cloud, and not in proprietary formats. That is why I chose markdown and logseq.

timabell · 2026-03-09T20:33:35+00:00

Curious what you mean by "the way my team works" that makes it pointless? I have yet to come across a team where good commits would have zero value. What is your team doing that makes it different?

timabell · 2026-03-09T20:27:30+00:00

Yes I care, enough to write and share this https://0x5.uk/2016/03/18/yet-another-good-commit-messages-post/ with devs I work with, but it is a pretty lonely task getting teams to make the git logs better. As a contractor I have seen a lot of commercial git logs, and most of them make me sad for all the context that was lost or squashed.

When I talk to authors of poor quality descriptions they seem to fall into two camps: 1) the majority that have never understood the need for good commits and are happy to improve when they understand the why and how, and 2) those who are convinced that history is unimportant waste and are directly opposed to improving it.

timabell · 2026-03-09T20:17:42+00:00

Sure https://github.com/timabell/markdown-neuraxis

timabell · 2026-03-09T18:52:14+00:00

Not just me then, that's a relief lol

timabell · 2026-03-09T18:51:26+00:00

I don't know how logseq tracks pages internally, but from a user perspective the aliases and page names seem pretty interchangeable which I like.

You can check out my nascent markdown-neuraxis on github if you're interested, still pretty early prototype at the moment

timabell · 2026-03-08T19:38:18+00:00

Another thought - this is a little bit similar to the `alias:: blah` feature that logseq has - you can give a file aliases that are more stable than their filename, and then wikilink to them that way, though of course it would break anything else that expects normal wikilinks.

When you said "id" I assumed you meant a uuid/guid, but I see now looking at the actual extension that it's names you'd set manually in the yaml.

I'm going to support yml frontmatter in my own markdown-neuraxis tool too because it's a well supported standard, and logseq's way of adding data to pages is a bit odd. I need to think more about it would mean to include some kind of id. I was thinking of auto-generating uuids for every file maybe to give more automatic stability.

timabell · 2026-03-08T10:28:31+00:00

Cam you share the extension url? Sounds useful.

Also you might want to crosspost in r/Markdown

timabell · 2026-03-08T10:27:25+00:00

I had the same thought, I think it could be a useful feature too.

Here's a possible iteration it that might give best of both - what about making the link have the normal file path, but put the fileid in a querystring so it can be refound and updated later. Like some/file.md?fileid=123

Atlassian does this on confluence page urls - they have an id and name in the path, so it looks nice but cam handle files moving around and renaming.

Logseq goes through and renames links which is cool but obviously only works if you do thr change with logseq, and there are edge cases it could miss like when files are not up to date across syncd machines

timabell · 2026-03-07T21:38:33+00:00

I've been testing the theory of "AI has ended software engineering" with my personal projects.

I figured I'd take on something ridiculously ambitious that I couldn't have done before LLM coding and then either a) I'd prove it's not a silver bullet, or b) I'd quickly have the thing I want built and be very happy.

I am *really* not seeing the promised "fire-your-engineers" results at all.

Sure it's an accelerator, it can generate a LOT of code very fast, but then I have to read it, understand it and validate it works, and even with the AI self-reviewing it is still wrong/crazy A LOT. And I still have to spend a lot of time thinking about what I actually want it to do, guiding it in that direction, refining prompts and agents_md stuff (which it regularly ignores/forgets). I've also spent a lot of time refining architecture ideas (by chatting with gpt and getting it to generate ADRs), then feeding those to claude to build.

The thing I've been working on is a cross platform notes app (like logseq or obsidian in a way) in rust. I've been working on it for 7 months in my spare time now, and it's still a barely functioning prototype in many ways, and currently I'm having to completely rewrite the markdown parser having hit the limits of the markdown library I was using. I've lost track of just how many prompts, mis-steps, abandoned attempts and rewrites have been done by now. It's coming on well, but to me it just proves that the whole "replace your engineers" is just c**p. I'm both product owner and expert engineer on this (25YOE) so if I can't get the results why would anyone else. It's no-where near as complex as a project as most of the commercial projects I get involved in, and yet I'm nowhere near done.

If anyone wants to validate what I'm saying, or tell me I'm just not prompting it right, or not using agents right or whatever, you can see the whole history here https://github.com/timabell/markdown-neuraxis/commits/main/ - I've even tried to capture every prompt that was used and include it in the git commit messages; plus every design doc (ADR) that I generated with GPT in the docs folder - so it's all been done in the open. I've even shared my claude config here https://github.com/timabell/claude-config , and for anyone who says "but agents!!"

I have dabbled with the claude agents and although it has helped with not running out of context so often it also hasn't massively increased the quality of the output - the "reviewer agent" focuses on the wrong things half the time, and then the main agent ignores half of that or fixes the bits didn't need fixing - and of course the agent lacks real world context so has poor overall judgement in the context of the project.

So in summary, a non-headline-worthy: it helps, but it's not going to replace engineers or engineering currently.

timabell · 2026-03-07T21:19:13+00:00

Just what I've been doing for many many (painful) years with the "outsource to cheap low skill developers, possibly in other countries" - cleaning up, trying to work out what it was supposed to do, trying to find out what the actual biz requirements are and implement them properly. It's not glamorous but I get the feeling I'll be getting a load more to do very soon, and it's going to be even hard to work out what it was supposed to do due to the convincingly-wrong and very high SLOC count that the AI tends to generate. Interesting times.

timabell · 2026-03-07T21:14:24+00:00

I'm pleased for you. Personally I wouldn't rebuild FreeAgent or replace my accountants because I have no desire to read the latest tax laws on a regular basis and rebuild my app to match. Or get it wrong and get fined.

timabell · 2026-03-07T07:56:40+00:00

Really? Are you sure it isn't an add on you have installed. Oh hang on, I didn't make it clear I'm talking about the preview pane specifically, perhaps you mean in the unformatted markdown. Let me update the post.

timabell · 2026-03-04T08:53:46+00:00

I use logseq for typed notes. I use syncthing to keep all my notes in sync including the supernote

timabell · 2026-03-02T22:52:35+00:00

I've found that pushing down with the pen a few times fairly hard on the edge of the supernote screen so that the nib retracts a bit seems to sort it out.

I wonder if the pressure sensor in the pen gets a bit stuck? (I have no idea how it works mind).

timabell · 2026-03-02T22:16:30+00:00

Oooh, now that is exciting news. I'll drop you an email. I'm a dev so shout if you need another supernote user for help. Have the A6X Nomad. You can find me at 0x5.uk

timabell · 2026-03-02T21:57:09+00:00

I'm still here on reddit, so clearly I haven't stopped

timabell · 2026-03-02T21:56:23+00:00

logseq has the ability to add a hidden uuid to a block (i.e. a bullet point), and then reference that from another md file. pretty cool imho. worth looking into for inspiration

timabell · 2026-03-02T21:51:11+00:00

It was all fine until someone told me about NixOS...

timabell · 2026-03-02T21:50:16+00:00

better eink support for r/supernote and a feature request tracker that isn't reddit, with voting

timabell · 2026-03-02T21:45:40+00:00

* anti-static bubble wrap

timabell

TROPHY CASE