I'm no fantasy author, and my prose leaves much to be desired. The stuff the LLM comes up with is so mind numbingly bland. I've given up on having it write descriptions of any characters or locations. I just use it for very general ideas and plot lines, and then come up with the rest of the details on the fly myself. The plot lines and ideas it comes up with are very generic and bland. I mainly do it just to save time, but I throw away 50% of the "ideas" because they make no sense or are really lame.

What i have found LLMs to be helpful with is writing up fun post-session recaps I share with the adventurers.

I recap in my own words what happened during the session, then have the LLM structure it into a "fun to read" narrative style. ChatGPT seems to prefer a Sanderson jokey tone, but I could probably tailor this.

Then I go through it, and tweak some of the boring / bland bits. The end result is really fun to read, and took 1/20th the time it would have taken me to write it all out myself. The LLM would have never been able to come up with the unique and fun story lines, but it is good at making an existing story have some narrative flare in a short amount of time.

It shocks me when proponents of AI writing for ideation aren't concerned with *Metaphoric Cleansing* and *Lexical Flattening* (to use two of the terms defined in the article)

Doesn't it concern you that the explanation of a concept by the AI may represent only a highly distorted caricature of the way that concept is actually understood by those who use it fluently?

Don't get me wrong, I think that LLMs are very useful as a sort of search engine for yet-unknown terms. But once you know *how* to talk about a concept (meaning you understand enough jargon to do traditional research), I find that I'm far better off tracking down books and human authored resources than I am trying to get the LLM to regurgitate its training data.

I started out with the Seaside framework, but I've done several variations on that theme in different languages along the way.

It goes something like this: A typed server side DOM with support for native callbacks, generates HTML and hooks up callbacks. Changes are submitted to the server similar to traditional HTML forms, but using JSON. Changes to the DOM generate JS that's returned from the submit.

One headache with this approach is that documents need to stick around or callbacks will fail, and you need to hit the same server to get the document.

It should be doable to put a serialized version of the DOM on the client and passing that to callbacks to be rebuilt on the server.

  > Honestly don't know what people think they are gaining with a heavy frontend.

So yes, if that's really what you want to do, React or similar is probably what you want.

If.

I'm increasingly thinking either people were terrible developers, used shit tools to begin with, or are in a mass psychosis. I certainly feel bad for anyone reporting to "the business guy." He never respected you to begin with, and now he literally thinks "why are you so slow? I can build Airbnb in a weekend."

For someone who previously could achieve nothing, these tools are magical, as they can now achieve something. It feels to them like infinity because their base was 0. That alone will create a lot of things they wouldn't have been able to, good for them. However for people who already know what they're doing, I only feel slightly pushed along some asymptote. My bottlenecks simply are not measured in tokens to screen.

To make it viable, all value objects are code-generated from model schemas, and then customized as needed (only like 5% need customization beyond basic data types). I have auto-upcasting on setters so you can code stringly when wanted, but everything is validated (very useful for writing unit tests more quickly). I only parse into types at boundaries or on writes/sets, not on reads/gets (limit's the amount of boxing, particularly on reading large amounts of data). Heavy use of reflection, and auto-wiring/dependency injection.

But with these conventions in place, I quite enjoy it. Easy to customize/narrow a type. One convention for all validation. External inputs are by default secure with nice error messages. Once place where all values validation happens (./values classes folder).

The argument seems to be, we should float on a thin lubricant of "that's someone else's concern" (either the AI or the PMs) gliding blissfully from one ticket to another. Neither grasping our goal nor our outcome. If the tests are green and the buttons submit, mission accomplished!

Using Claude I can feel my situational awareness slipping from my grasp. It's increasingly clear that this style of development pushes you to stop looking at any of the code at all. My English instructions do not leave any residual growth. I learn nothing to send back up the chain, and I know nothing of what's below. Why should I exist?

Granted one person can't know/do everything, but large companies in particular seem allergic to granting you any visibility whatsoever. It's particularly annoying when you're given a deadline, bust your ass working overtime to make it, only to discover that said deadline got extended at a meeting you weren't invited to and nobody thought to tell you about it. Or worse, they were doing some dark management technique of "well he's really hauling ass right now, if he makes the original deadline we'll be ahead of schedule, and if he doesn't we have the spare capacity".

If the expectation is I'm a tool for management to use, then I'll perform my duties to the letter and no further. If the expectation is ownership, then I need to at least sit at the cool kids' table and maybe even occasionally speak when I have something relevant to contribute.

watch me try, at least.

> but large companies in particular seem allergic to granting you any visibility whatsoever. It's particularly annoying

If the blind spot is directly causing customer pain, find metrics that demonstrate the impact. If it ends up driving away your customers, then your company is securing itself to death.

You are implying efficient market theory, which is bunk.

Example: Our banks have endless painful papercuts yet most of us don't change banks just because of one pain.

We each respond to our own complex of costs and benefits (or risks versus rewards).

Second example: I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same bugs and misfeatures that seem to never get fixed/improved.

Your chain of reasoning is broken? Or is it your model of the world?

Only because they're all painful. If there was a bank that was recognized as perfect, people would switch in short order. Switching to another bank that is also painful is not worth the effort.

> I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same bugs and misfeatures that seem to never get fixed/improved.

Only because nobody else sells an iPhone. People would start switching over to other, less buggy iPhone on the market if there was such a thing.

> You are implying efficient market theory, which is bunk.

The efficient market theory says that, in an active market, prices rapidly reflect all publicly available information. How does that apply here, bunk or not?

One bank pissed me off due to an extremely dishonest thing they did. So I overdrafted the account to the max ($500) and left them the bill.

(Not the first time I've done something like that to someone who deserved it. I've done much, much more in some cases. Endless painful papercuts? Nope, I do not accept that.)

They weren't happy about this. I think they hit "my" "credit" with that for years. I never noticed, as I don't borrow money; the machinations of these "credit reporting" agencies are beneath my concern. They have no credit in my eyes. I don't consort with crooks, I just punish them.

> Second example: I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same bugs and misfeatures that seem to never get fixed/improved.

I haven't had a phone in decades at this point. Don't want one. I refused to be tracked, monitored, or abused by anyone. And no, I sure don't give a single fuck about any of the many people (and there have been MANY) who have tried their best to shame, cajole, insult, ridicule, harass, intimidate, or bully me into getting a phone. Fuck em all.

> Your chain of reasoning is broken? Or is it your model of the world?

Maybe it's you who's broken. Why do you accept slavery? Just to fit in?

Since you're hardly the only one with a similar way of thinking, maybe we could say it's the entire society that's broken.

I simply do not tolerate the things that you tolerate.

I realize this is a radical concept for your society, which at this moment is thoroughly unjust. Familiarize yourself with this concept now, as it will come up later on the test.

No wonder you keep getting robbed and fucked over all the time. You think it's somehow morally wrong to strike back! It's like you were born and bred to be a victim.

This also explains why so many others get victimized while you stand by and watch idly. Because you think there's nothing wrong with your fellow man getting fucked over!

I could explain more, but it would be useless, as your confusion is at this time far too thick and heavy to be dispelled by just one guy like me. What you're gonna need is somebody like me in your local area to help educate you.

My recommendation is to just double park your big ass honkin truck or Maserati somewhere, then just watch and see what happens. Eventually, you will reach enlightenment.

First off, you make me think of an awakened and fully actualized version of Luke Smith.

So you're like, a hardcore American Libertarian? The no phone thing is incredibly based, and personally I think smashing a shopping cart into some asshole's truck is both hilarious and just. I do similar when I cone illegally parked cars.

So why libertarian and not anarchist? You seem to appreciate direct action. You seem to have opposition to all forms of oppression be they coming from the government or a bank or a corporation, you're willing to make what some would consider huge personal sacrifice to stand for your values. Is it an inherent distaste of leftist thought? If you are libertarian, that word was born in the most far left circles possible. It still is a synonym for "anarchist" in most places in the world.

I'm not trying to get your goat here. I like talking to people with completely different ideologies than me. Keeps me on my toes, prevents fossilization.

The product may take 20 minute to boot - a testament to its complexity and greatness (/s). But pointing that out might end badly when it’s the SVP’s pet. They will not entertain alternatives or efforts that distract from their mental plan.

And if a developer finds themselves getting feedback or communication from customers, things are probably on fire - absolutely literally.

As a business analyst who has worked a lot with executive teams at multiple companies, this is almost always the case (ime). Deadlines are only shortened down the chain, never extended. The assumption is that if it cannot be done then they will simply not administer any consequences and classify it as "not realizing the upside".

The only reason it is almost always and not always, is because sometimes a different thing pops up that needs to get prioritized first, so it is communicated that the first thing isnt actually as important as it was yesterday and this other thing is now the most important.

Now obviously I cant speak for everyone at all teams, but as far as boring corporate default behavior goes this is the safe path for executives. If your boss is doing otherwise, they are going out of their way to do it.

The takeaway as a worker is that you should not treat any business goal or deadline ask of you with the same level of care as you would a personal favor. When something really needs that level of care, your boss should pull you aside and break character and make it a personal favor to them, not the business.

As far as "Ownership" goes, it is just a pissing contest as far as I can tell. if you own a task but cant do the task, you just send an email to someone who can do the task so that the task gets done and you can report the task is done and get your ownership credit. the person who did the task was used as a tool in this regard. So high performing managers just try to get ownership of as much as they possibly can, as there's no meaningful difference between who sends that email.

I’ve been dragged into modifying my team’s product to fix deficiencies in others’ designs.

They didn’t want take ownership and freely pushed it onto us!

Then you don't have ownership. What you have is responsibility without ownership or authority if this rug pull can be performed.

It's a simple formula. If you want me to be personally invested in my work and go above and beyond, then I need the motivation to do that. So either you grant me a reasonable level of professional input such that my opinion is valued and I'm helping the mission succeed, or pay me for said extra effort (can be opportunities for promotion, direct overtime pay, career advancement, etc). If you want me super-motivated you can even do both!

If we're playing hardball "you're some lowly IC nerd without an MBA or connections and we're here to make money so fuck you" capitalism, well the only serious leverage I have to is to take my talents where they're most appreciated. So you'll get exactly what you pay for until I find something better, and aside from some professional courtesy I'll be looking. Maybe you're fine with that, but if you start preaching "ownership" of the product just be aware that the entire dev team is going to pay you lip service and then laugh as soon as you're out of the room, and we clock out at 5:00, even if we don't on paper. Except for poor Bob who due to life/family commitments has no option to leave and needs to rationalize his situation even though he agrees with us. Sometimes we'll tone it down just so he doesn't feel too bad about being trapped. Regardless, in that environment we take ownership of our careers, not our work.

I've worked both types of jobs. I'd say the former worked the best for all involved, but the latter has its place and is fine so long as everyone acknowledges what game we're playing and expectations are set appropriately.

In the prior 30 years of my programming life, so much time was spent "yak shaving"... setting up all the boilerplate, adding basic functionality you always have to do, setting up support systems, etc. With Claude, all of those things are so quick to complete that I can stay focused on what I am actually trying to do, and can therefore keep more of the core functionality I am caring about in my head. I don't have to push the core, novel, parts of my work aside to do the parts that are the same across other projects.

So what you say is true about boilerplate reduction, but that’s not a huge ROI for enterprise software.

(Some exceptions apply, there’s always some setup work for a new microservice etc. But even those don’t happen weekly or even monthly)

(Not complaining - it was a good update that revealed a bug in our code.)

I really don't care to much any more to learn about the histories of python packaging. Claude fixed it for me and that was it.

Like you're sitting in your ide, select a few rows, press (for example) caps lock to activate speech and then just say a short line what it should adjust or similar - which is then staged for the next adjustments to be done with the same UX

Like saying "okay, I need a new usecase here, let's start by making a function to do y. [Function appears] great, we need to wire with object into it [point at class] [LLM backtracking code path via language server until it finds it and passes things through]

The main blocking issue to that UX would likely be the speed of the response, as the transcription would be pretty much instant, but the coding prompt after would still take a few moments to be good... And such an interactive approach would feel a lot better with speed.

Too bad nobody seems to target the combined mouse+voice control for LLMs yet. It would even double as a fantastic accessibility tool for people suffering from various typing related issues

its always going to do better if you give it a stronger description of the problem, and give it some more freedom on the solution.

if youre sitting more in the solution side, youre going to be dictating those exact functions because theres not enough context for it to just know what the right function you need is

For myself, I like to know what's going on, to a certain extent, but appreciate abstraction.

I am also aware that people like me, probably don't make commercial sense, but that's already been the case for quite some time.

Same as "self-driving cars", the automated farm machinery can't cope with any sort of change in its environment.

The core operating principle of which says capitalism requires and promotes systems that enforce the separation of labor from the product they produce. This precludes fellow laborers from meaningfully communicating with each other; knowledge sharing could expose more of how the product "works" after all! Only in final combination, following an undisclosed (to the worker) larger plan, does the product become whole and provide utility.

So not knowing "what happens" in layers "above" and "below" you for your specific work unit is key. This is the "de-skilling" tenet of capitalism and is required for exploitation, conformity, at scale. As labor units become smaller, they require less skill and time to produce, rendering laborers "conditioned to a machine." In other words, workers must acquiesce their skills in the name of "progress" of the system itself. This can easily be sold to the laborers, couched by real world data highlighting the obvious efficiency gains, along with a heavy bonus of having to do less work yourself.

Only by making ever smaller parts of a whole, awhile hiding the utility of those parts produced, can capital rob labor of their value (their skill, their products, their output.)

This very same system lends itself to outcompeting private labor by way of parallelization: as it just so happens that smaller slices of work tend to parallelize better than larger ones. If you can operate at a scale that bespoke creators have no chance of replicating on their own, you "win!" The beautiful moat, the envy of all.

In other words, you're just describing being a worker in a highly efficient capitalist machine! Look! We're almost there! I can just about smell all the "winning" from here...

> My English instructions do not leave any residual growth. I learn nothing to send back up the chain, and I know nothing of what's below. Why should I exist?

When you use Claude code, tell it to keep a markdown file updated with the what and the why. Instead of just “Do $y”, “Because of $x I need to do $y”. If it is updated in the markdown file, it will be recorded and sometime the agent will come up with code and mske changes that are correct. But use cases you didn’t think about. You can then even ask it “why did it do $x” that you weren’t expecting but oh yeah, it was right.

> Why should I exist?

That’s the wrong question, the correct question is “why is my employer paying me?”. Your employer is paying you to turn well defined requirements into working code to either make them money or to save them money if (the royal) you are a mid level ticket taker. If someone is working at that level, that’s what they are regardless of title.

No one cares if either you or the LLM decided to use a for loop or a while loop.

At higher levels you are responsible for taking your $n number of years of experience to turn more ambiguous, more impactful, larger scoped projects into working implementations that are done on time, on budget and meets requirements. Before LLMs, that meant a combination of my own coding, putting a team together and delegating and telling my director/CTO that this isn’t something we should be doing in house (ie a Salesforce or Workday integration) at all.

Now add to the mix between all those resources - a coding agent. In either case, I as anything above ticket taker, probably haven’t looked at a line of code first. I test for does it meet the functional and non functional requirements and then mostly look at the hot spots - concurrency issues, security issue, and are there any scalability issues that are obvious before I hammer it with real world like traffic - web request or transactions for an ETL job.

And before the pearl clutching starts, I started programming as a hobby in the 80s in assembly and spent the first decade and a half of my career doing C bit twiddling on multiple mainframes, PCs, and later Windows CE devices.

Is this not a job for LLMs, though?

But even now it’s struggling on a project to understand the correlation between “It is creating Lambda code to do $x meaning it needs to change the corresponding IAM role in CloudFormation to give it permission it needs”

I guess I could be more detailed in the prompt/md files about every time it changes lambda code, check the permissions in the corresponding IAC and check to see if a new VPC endpoint is needed.

I swear, do you people even hear yourselves?

I'm also working on a new strength gains-tracking app that is a lot more intuitive, motivating and friend first. I've been using it with some friends for the last 10 weeks and everyone making is consistent gains. It is my first full PWA, vanillaJs, backend is Lucee & MySQL. Works great on iOS and Android, no one has any complaints. The web stack has come a long way I am probably not going to do a native mobile app for a while. I'll probably make it public in a couple weeks.