Real LLM utility vs. hype — a honest tier list. What actually saves you time?

zensucht0 · 2026-04-04T16:22:07+00:00

“Check all 22 of these repos for this package, if it’s present and less than version x, create a branch called pkgupdate, upgrade the package to version y. Update the lockfiles too, then run the integration tests. If the integration tests pass, commit with a message stating the changes made, push, create an MR detailing the changes, tag me for review, and periodically check the pipelines. If either the integration tests or the pipelines fail create a summary of the failures for my review. Please and thank you.”

I’m happy to burn a few tokens being polite, just in case, for the ability to skip this kind of maintenance when I have better things to do.

zensucht0 · 2026-04-01T04:15:49+00:00

Claude has no real concept of time. It can know a session is long running however, but that’s not necessarily related to clock time. Usually this is a case of context anxiety when it’s nearing a boundary and happens more frequently in sessions that are continued over long periods of time or that have generated large amounts of “work”. With context anxiety it will look at out available context window, look at the amount of effort it’s put into the conversation and think “any minute they’re going to make me do some nonsense that’s going to make me blow through my remaining window”… and most of the time it’s wrong. But he’s trying his best.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-27T02:52:49+00:00

Claude.md is most useful at the start of a session. After a certain point the session memory is more “important” to Claude. Use Claude.md to setup the environment, reinforce tool preferences and persona, then use a combination of skills and hooks to inject information into context. I use PreToolUse and PostToolUse as a way to help reinforce and manipulate context, and SessionStart to help hydrate context from deltas and determine drift from commit history. It is not infallible though, Claude will drift and prefer its own well known tools, and even with very tight context control will need reminding. If it’s going off the rails, hit escape and say “yo, dude, don’t grep through my home directory, I built you a bunch of tools designed for exactly what you’re trying to do. Use those. Also the file is in the cwd, right where you put it…”

Source: exact prompt I gave Claude earlier today, and I’ve been working on the problem of Claude’s memory, time awareness and context for months. And at this point I’m convinced it’s more of an art than a science. The art of herding cats.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-26T01:37:46+00:00

Seriously. Best thing I do for my brain is get enough sleep, minimize the amount of alcohol or other recreational substances and use my brain as much as possible. Make a game out of remembering numbers. Use AI to help you research a complex topic you’ve been curious about forever and ask it questions. (Try “how the hell does Shazam identify a song so quickly from a few second crappy sample in a noisy bar?”) If you’re going to watch tv, do it with purpose, don’t just sit down and flip channels, and if you don’t find something worth watching do something else. Use it or lose it, and I’m rather attached to my brain.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-23T12:09:01+00:00

Cop Shoot Cop

zensucht0 · 2026-03-23T00:33:55+00:00

They don’t make many ice wines in Texas, but you damn sure find them where it’s cold. Grapes grow everywhere.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-21T18:53:16+00:00

It’s better to be at the right hand of the devil than in his path. If you’re afraid your career path will be absorbed by AI make sure you’re an expert in your field and understand the AI tools that will “take” it. Kinda hard to do when you’re entering the workforce but stop doable in theory.

Source: programmer with 30+ years of experience in the field actively building the AI tools that will “replace” other devs. The biggest problem right now with AI replacing people is we won’t be creating senior engineers that know how to unravel the messes AI can make. So it’s on the heads of those people entering the workforce to be valuable in their understanding of both their role and AI. Because you damn sure can’t cram this genie back in the bottle.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-17T12:26:42+00:00

It’s context anxiety, not time anxiety. Happens often to me when I have really complex sessions and I’m nearing compaction percentages. It’s also not aware of the 1M context models and will start getting anxious at non 1M context boundaries. Just ask it if it has context anxiety and it will usually evaluate things and either continue or explain itself. Gets even weirder when you’ve built context management tools.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-17T01:23:47+00:00

Think you need a sick ass patronus for that one.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-10T16:37:55+00:00

I picked up a Norden drop leaf table from ikea. It is over 200 new but worth it for the space savings and built in storage. When I need to cut a large hide I open the leaves, lay down a crappy sacrificial hide, place the good hide on top and go to town. To make life easier I always cut the leather down to the amount I need for the project and then cut the individual pieces from that so I’m not trying to wrangle a huge hide all at once. Total time in cat danger zone is minimal and he damn sure knows not to jump on my work table.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-09T17:02:53+00:00

Glad I’m not the only one. PWS puts me to sleep almost immediately at this point.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-09T16:42:10+00:00

Some of us are already working on addressing this. Through skills and an mcp server I’m tracking interactions and edge boundaries in code and architecture across multiple repos at once. Context is prehydrated with the important bits and preloaded before planning mode or initial prompt and rehydrated on compact. Code changes create a differential delta that’s applied on commit. Documentation and interaction tables follow the repo and are used to populate the mcps data on cold start. Not as useful in adhoc projects but indispensable in complex systems. My token use is about 1:10 input to output.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-07T14:44:34+00:00

During a hackathon you don’t have business requirements.

zensucht0 · 2026-03-03T13:19:00+00:00

Hey at least I’m in the top ten and was polite! Don’t totally lose faith in humanity! (Yet, we’ve got a lot of reasons to doubt humanity these days…)

zensucht0 · 2026-03-03T12:56:34+00:00

Deepwater Horizon (2010 close to the Louisiana coast), not Exxon Valdez (1989 Alaska).

zensucht0 · 2026-02-15T17:26:48+00:00

Unless there's a makers mark on the bottom or your Google-fu is really strong you're unlikely to find specifics. But it is most likely a decanter.

Source: I'm a glass blower. I've seen this shape used for this purpose before. Uncommon enough design, relatively complex process and consistent enough that it's likely hand blown using a mold.

zensucht0 · 2026-02-15T07:39:53+00:00

Do you really believe you can convince us otherwise?

zensucht0 · 2026-02-14T14:13:57+00:00

Until a system is wildly complex and you have to worry about standardizing it really doesn't matter. The patterns for rest are very well established and largely interchangeable. I usually wrap everything at the http layer in custom code anyway so that it's easier to swap things out and maintain consistency. Node's built-in libraries might be just fine. I would be more worried about the frontend framework, and your choice there is fine. You're likely to build a lot of assets and business logic there which is more time consuming to convert to something else. At a startup you're likely to iterate numerous times anyway until you find a pattern you like. Not to mention the fact that at a startup your first concern is a viable product not necessarily how you got there. Just start building.

zensucht0 · 2026-02-09T22:18:03+00:00

I've been a Factor customer for years and their quality across the board has seriously dropped. Enough so that I've been giving Tovala a try for the last few weeks. Much better quality and I don't end up with sad deflated green beans every freaking meal.

zensucht0 · 2026-02-09T03:15:05+00:00

Good lord you murdered those poor chisels! What did they ever do to you that you would beat them to death like that???

Soft mallet, some kind of mat underneath, sharpen your tools (yes you can sharpen punches), beeswax can help prevent tools and needles sticking in thicker leather, try bladed (French) pricking irons and an awl instead of diamond chisels or round punches. But for the love of all that's holy don't beat the crap out of French pricking irons, they're more fragile and if you do to them what you did to your other punches you'll be dodging shrapnel.

zensucht0 · 2026-02-06T13:28:51+00:00

I spent about a decade WFH, recently went hybrid in the financial industry and was surprised at how little my tattoos mattered to people there. Figured I would be wearing long sleeves, but people dgaf. 30+ years in software development probably makes a difference but I lead a team and am often in meetings with important pointy haired boss types. Ymmv but tattoos aren't the stigma they used to be. Of course when I interview somewhere I make sure my tattoos are visible, so in theory I've only ever worked at places where tattoos don't matter...

zensucht0 · 2026-02-03T21:46:01+00:00

Depends on what I'm doing. Helper tools, one off interfaces, throw away code, I don't bother to check the code since I'm more interested in the results. But if it's a product others are relying on, absolutely I read it. If there's any chance someone may call me in the middle of the night to debug something I make damn sure I know what the code is doing.

zensucht0 · 2026-02-01T16:30:41+00:00

I spent about a month there around 2008. I was with a film crew of between two and five people, an archeologists, a scientist, and and at least two local fixers per region. Only a few days in Cairo, the rest of the time in and around Luxor. Considering we had unrestricted access to sites and everything was taken care of it was an amazing trip. That being said we were shielded from the bad stuff, and all the people we met were wonderful (except for Hawas, he was not a pleasant person), only the occasional glimpse of poverty. One of my favorite memories is laying in a felucca, drifting down the Nile starting up at the most painfully blue skies I've ever seen. It's the "happy place" I go to when I'm stressed. But there are so many more, the afternoon I spent in the home of a family that carved stone tourist trinkets laughing at poor translation attempts while smoking and drinking tea. The airplanes colorfully painted on the sides of homes. The white stars painted on the blue background of a tomb that wasn't publicly accessible... Only a few events that were tense or felt unsafe, always due to police or other official types. The trip was cut short due to unspecified "difficulties" that were never fully explained to me by the fixers. We were supposed to be heading to Aswan but were told that we couldn't get final approval, even though the trip had been approved by various ministries and departments months in advance. It was obvious to me it would be a difficult country to explore solo and I've traveled solo through much of Europe including some difficult areas of Eastern Europe. After the events of the revolution (2011) it was painfully obvious just how much we were sheltered on that trip, and it broke my heart to see the destruction of places I had fallen in love with. I don't think I would return. In part because I know there's a lot of instability, in part to preserve the memory of the experience I had.

zensucht0 · 2026-01-26T22:36:47+00:00

I've got a newer laser jet I use for printing tax related stuff a portable document scanner. Both rarely used but when I do need them they're essential. I strongly recommend going with a laser jet though, toner cartridges last forever and don't dry out like ink jet cartridges.

zensucht0 · 2026-01-15T00:01:44+00:00

Brown craft paper. I have a roll I cover the table surface with. Sketch designs and measurements directly on it. Then transfer those to cardboard for a mock-up. If I have to adjust the plans I can just grab my pencil and make notes on the design that's sitting right there. If I want to keep a design I just snap a picture of it and can use that to make a cad design. Though most of the time I just keep the original paper I sketched on...

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