I causally mentioned having worked on many large OSS projects at Microsoft and MFer went on GitHub and counted my contributions. 🤣

Nick Guerrera@nguerrera.dev · 2d ago

Sometimes Opus 5 argues with me on trivial things that I'm already 100% sure about and starts doing minutes of deep research to prove me wrong. I think it's the price to pay for convincing it to check everything carefully. I accept this trade but sometimes it still YOLOs its own work unpredictably.

Lesson learned: skills are great for isolated simple things but if you find yourself accidentally writing a system that can fail and need debugging in markdown, stop. The iteration time on the markdown is atrocious and you never know for sure if you fixed anything.

Sometimes Opus 5 argues with me on trivial things that I'm already 100% sure about and starts doing minutes of deep research to prove me wrong. I think it's the price to pay for convincing it to check everything carefully. I accept this trade but sometimes it still YOLOs its own work unpredictably.

A computer just informed me that while its instructions did in fact say something important, it "skimmed past it." What have we done?

It’s much easier to document everything with AI assistance. But I’m not sure how I feel about having lots of prose in a repo no other human has touched in a voice that doesn’t sound like me. It’s almost creepy.

Claude is down. Help, what’s a computer? xkcd.com/903/

Extended Mind

xkcd.com

So funemployment (or semi-retirement, pre-revenue) is going well and I use Arch now, btw. I’m also vibe coding my own personal Arch installer with a test suite that runs parallel installs and validates different things about them in VMs.

If you missed the LinkedIn post, I was not eligible for the Microsoft program but I retired anyway. At some point, I will probably look to make it into to more of a semi-retirement but for now I’m enjoying the summer off.

I encounter broken software in the wild every day. I wish we were more interested in fixing this than churning out more broken software cheaper and faster.

“The regex made wrong replacements. Let me revert and take a more careful approach.” I feel your pain, my digital brother.

Reposting this banger to note that it helps that agents can fix jinglehopper vs. beebeehams conflicts now.

Kevin Jones@vcsjones.dev · 2y ago

I very much like Linux, but without fail anytime I see someone trying to "switch to Linux" I see a post in a few days saying "I updated my jinglehopper and now my beebeehams stopped working, any ideas?"

It’s weird that nobody has anything to say about how AI will impact the future.

There should be a rule that “nit: …” PR comments are only permitted when you review promptly.

Have people started saying “ralphable” yet? “Yeah that sounds hard, but it’s ralphable”

Phillip Carter@phillipcarter.dev · 5mo ago

Side note, this is the whole "ralphing" thing using programming languages or porting a compiler or whatever to another language. I have worked on compilers! They are actually easier to validate than you would think! The function is automatic, for one, making them well-suited to these experiments.

Lines of code produced was always a bad metric but it is now officially and forever removed of any and all meaning. Good riddance.

One of the critical things that distinguishes a senior developer from a junior developer is an understanding, deep in their bones, that the cost of DOING a thing is cheap compared to the cost of truly FINISHING a thing and utterly trivial compared to the cost of MAINTAINING a thing. Like 1:10:10000.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 6mo ago

While Wall Street now thinks AI will disrupt SaaS apps. I think the reality will be nuanced: 1. Companies vibe coding solutions will hurt niche apps but not major ones. Vibe coding a CRM or HR system to save costs would be madness. 2. Some apps will die because they will just be features of LLMs.

I'm writing another book, and the first few chapters are available through Manning Early Access now! For 50% off! hubs.la/Q03Q9PGP0 More details, and the story of how I came to write it, are on my blog at ericlippert.com/2025/10/30/i... It feels great to be writing again after a long break. :)

Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms - Eric Lippert

Author Eric Lippert introduces fabulous solutions using uncommon algorithms and data structures. There’s a lot more to algorithms than the useful-but-boring recipes you recite for every interview. Th...

hubs.la

I find it funny that when you're done with a rental from a `MemoryPool`, you dispose the owner.

Copilot: "Let me read lines 1-50... Ok, let's read some more lines..." Read the whole file, bro, you're a computer!

I think somebody vibe coded floating point where it has no business being used at fidelity.com. I have 0.0003 shares of MSFT now. I had to subtract $0.01 from amount shown “available to withdraw” for it to stop saying “you don’t have enough cash”. 🙃

My favorite video game is typing things into this box and then erasing it because I realize nobody will care.

Foo(Bar()); Code review: LGTM — var x = Bar(); Foo(x); Code review: The type of ‘x’ is not apparent, don’t use var here. — Please explain to me how these are different. I legitimately don’t get it.

The people who think they are good at everything because they are good at coding are also bad at coding.

🤮

Does M365 Copilot re-pin itself to taskbar every time you reboot? I hope this is just a bug and not by design. I have sent feedback.

We’d have AGI already if we never invented uppercase letters, backwards slashes, and redundant ways to indicate the end of a line.

There are dumb people saying dumb things on the old site. I’m well aware and I don’t want a play-by-play.

I very much like Linux, but without fail anytime I see someone trying to "switch to Linux" I see a post in a few days saying "I updated my jinglehopper and now my beebeehams stopped working, any ideas?"

What’s the most abused feature in C# and why is it extension methods?

Thanks for the kind words, Kirill! You're a huge inspiration to me. I will echo the sentiment of many others here and say that if it weren't for msbuildlog.com, I never would have been able to have the impact that I've had.

Kirill Osenkov@kirillosenkov.com · 2y ago

When @nickcraver.com joined Microsoft I was curious what he will naturally gravitate towards after he looks around. Nick looked around and decided to fix builds! When @nguerrera.dev joined Microsoft, I already knew what he will deem to be most impactful task for starters: fixing builds!