Daniel Grant
@djgrant.bsky.social
Building stuff. Blog at danielgrant.co.
One shift I've noticed coding with agents: a greater appreciation that I am channeling the sum of human knowledge. I think this was always true – we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors – but now it's explicit, I am more humble about my contributions.
contemplating "principle of least software" a key source of slop is creating more software than needed to achieve its aim e.g. building an electron app with auth when a cli tool would do. we do this because it is so cheap to create software. there is a lack of back-pressure.
i've been preserving agent threads for when the thing they've built gets broken - just return to the original thread and tell it to restore the feature. it got me thinking: what if i had a directory of these threads that served as a kind of regression suite?
🎉 TinyBase v8.3 - the one with @solidjs.com! Primitives and components to work with Solid - just like you can with React & Svelte! Major props to Daniel Grant (@djgrant.bsky.social) for the hard work to get this going!
Talking to a model that seems eerily human? BUG! This is very similar to the skeuomorphism trend that accompanied the launch of the iPhone. And once it has served its purpose it needs to be burned with fire. substack.com/home/post/p-...
Anthropomorphism is the New Skeuomorphism
This phase needs to be brough to a swift end.
substack.com
conveniently, the market for people who think they have good taste is quite large
these two positions are irreconcilable: 1. tech debt doesn't matter 2. context is really important tech debt *is* context! code is an ontological representation of the thing you are building. if it's not coherent, you are literally feeding your agent a million bad prompts
those who *rely* on AI for guidance will have a painful collision with reality
Annnd the blog posts have been published! 🐝 Find them on my website in the little writing nook 💖 jclahoot.com?position=%7B...
I wrote about some things I'm struggling with in the technology industry, preceded by an appreciation for folk music.
I am in an abusive relationship with the technology industry
Some things I'm struggling with in the technology industry, an appreciation for folk music, and some other thoughts.
whitep4nth3r.com
Always building, never shipping danielgrant.co/posts/always...
Always Building, Never Shipping
danielgrant.co
how quickly we regressed from not reviewing the code to not reviewing the strike target
Claude stuck fixing a bug. No problem. I can deal with this. Roll up sleeves. Open codebase. Oh good god
You Are Going To Make It – advice for junior developers. danielgrant.co/posts/gmi
You Are Going To Make It
danielgrant.co
Like a siren, the closer you get to an LLM, the harder it becomes to peceive what it actually is.
Codex 5.3: "This epic improves review throughput with concrete fixes, not aesthetic refactors" Me: "That is a bullshit statement" Codex 5.3: "Agreed. I'II replace it with concrete, non-bullshit wording and tighten the whole epic to explicit problems"
thinking about why openclaw blew up 1. people love talking to agents with a persistent personality 2. perhaps the first maintstream example of a self-improving software environment the personal assistant part wasn't new
if everyone has a personal agent, collective action becomes a much less tractable problem. people already have aligned goals; it's the coordination that's tricky. agents can probably help here. that could have consequences.
amazing how fast we transitioned from "everything should be rewritten in rust for memory safety" to "I ship code I will never read"
it's so tempting with ai to build the superficially functional version first. build the hard bit first. the facade will emerge naturally.
The predicted revolution must always be imminent; the reason to hand over money immediate.
Claude Code should have a team of 5-10 engineers. Instead they're hiring dozens of operators to manage LLMs. Absolutely bonkers.
til there's a cross-platform compiler that runs on bare metal – it's like java but with no interpreter or vm github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
GitHub - jart/cosmopolitan: build-once run-anywhere c library
build-once run-anywhere c library. Contribute to jart/cosmopolitan development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
well now that programming is over I guess we just spend all day writing instructions for the computer to execute
The two-year long narrative that software engineers didn't adopt AI coding because they were in denial is now obvious horseshit. Once the models got good enough the industry pivoted on a dime. No-one in their right mind would write code with sonnet 3.7.