Small Programming Tricks

Is this just plain old rage baiting? I literally can’t tell any more.

Those are also the current days if you have any sense. It's a bad idea to run an LLM with access to your machine at all, but if you absolutely must, you better review everything it does to make sure it doesn't run anything insane.

I frequently do the same, but not everyday; only when i think its something actually useful/helpful beyond the everyday crap. Most recently, we have had a huge push to use ai (just like everywhere else), ive been getting pretty creative with it, and at this point have a well polished setup that i can give a shitty sentence on a problem, not only does it understand the task, but theres a full ticket->branch->work->pr review->ready comment flow that it uses. My team also uses ai but they havent quite wrapped their head on ways to really work with it. I have built and shared a number of helpful things with the team to try and help them grow. One such thing was a doc i had my ai instance write, based on how ive been using my setup. This alone has started to get the rest of the team up to where i am.

My team doesnt share the same types of things i do, but they still share helpful things.

Call it what you will; I think if youre not helping your team grow by providing insights and helpful things, then youre not the kind of person i want to work with.

Annoyance is a clue; not about them, but about you.

I have always felt like my bar for publishing something (even just to internal wikis/channels) is too high due to being overly self-conscious. I think we should try not to validate that feeling by implying that there is a non-negligible number of readers who will think you have a personality flaw because you wrote down your personal collection of tips in a public place, or that those people deserve consideration in the first place.

There is no such thing as "the things everybody knows". There are just too many things. Even a list of basic tips is probably going to contain one thing I didn't know or perhaps forgot. Write-ups like this are where most of my practical knowledge comes from, not RTFM (which I do).

Or stupid, like all those vloggers posting "ZOMG! Go all in with these secret hidden weird trick iPhone life hacks to level up!" that are just regurgitating what's in the manual.

As we used to say, RTFM: https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/iphone

IMHO the value of these nuggets is that you understand what you're doing and why; opening yourself to large amounts of non-default behavior likely will end up in a less than pleasant setup.

Not taking into account that different users might disagree on what is convenient and what is not, which is basically the point of making things configurable.

I'm fortunate I guess in that most of my work tasks have very loosely defined deadlines, if any at all.

I write everything myself. After 41 years of coding, I think in code — code flows from my brain through my fingers effortlessly: translating my thoughts to English for an LLM to then translate back to code is much, much slower than me.

JetBrains Rider has an AI auto-complete which I do use for the 5-10% of the time that it can predict what I’m going to write next.

Disclaimer: I’m not writing vanilla line-of-business code or bog standard web apps, so I suspect I’m just not in the training data.

I don’t mean this to brag, mostly to point out that in my line of work, actually writing the code is not the biggest bottleneck.

For context I work on greenfield network security appliances

So i still get daily use out of these tricks.

Are there people that are literally ONLY interacting with a computer via an LLM? thats crazy if its true