oldnewthing

2개월 전discuss

Not sure what value your comment added. Software engineering is also problem solving. Are you arguing it is not?

2개월 전discuss

Hey, I agree with you. I and my team have the same existential worries. This was one reason why I bought my own subscriptions to Claude and Codex to learn and skill up. I have been using that to intensively do side projects, curating prompts and workflows to see how these new tools fit in my toolbox. I have been bringing back the learnings to my team so that they can upskill as well.

For context, I use Claude and Codex (side projects, Max and Pro plans respectively) and Gemini at work.

The key takeaway I have is: These tools have let me climb up the value chain ladder.

Even with Claude (Max plan, Opus 4.8, High Effort), it makes tons of mistakes, assumes a lot, misses nuance and doesn't really think through every aspect of the problem from every angle. Limited memory, lack of full context and a lack of experience with real world distributed systems means that the initial solutions they offer need a lot of iteration and refinement. Just like any junior engineer would need to do.

So, you might feel that with a LLM, "this should just be an hour" but it usually becomes a 2-week exercise for me.

Which brings me to what I tell my team repeatedly: "the only person with the big picture is you." I ask them to focus on thinking, ideating, refining. Do quick PoCs, talk to customers, discern what they are trying to achive, and what you can do to solve those problems. Work with Gemini (we can only use Gemini at work) to iterate until you are comfortable with the full solution end to end with all the nuances. Then let the agent code.

This moves you up the value chain from being a programmer to a problem solver. That's what software engineering has always been about: solving problems. Don't be discouraged. In fact, I am having more fun, am more energized and loving my craft even more now with LLMs. I am able to write down my thoughts, iterate on them and create a one-pager for ideas fast and get them to my team for them to think about. Sure, probably half of them we discard because it's usually not a "now" problem but we put that in our backlog to dust off when the first customer asks for it.

oldnewthing

4개월 전discuss

I also have the following in ~/.bashrc

export CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS=64000 export MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=31999 export DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER=1 export CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING=1

oldnewthing

4개월 전discuss

If this helps, I rolled back to version 2.1.34. Here is the ~/.claude/settings.json blurb I added:

  "effortLevel": "high",
  "autoUpdatesChannel": "stable",
  "minimumVersion": "2.1.34",
  "env": {
      "DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER": 1,
      "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING": 1
  }

I also had to:

1. Nuke all other versions within /.local/share/claude/versions/ except 2.1.34. 2. Link ~/.local/bin/claude to claude -> ~/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.34

This seems to have fixed my running out of quota issues quickly problems. I have periods of intense use (nights, weekends) and no use (day job). Before these changes, I was running out of quota rather quickly. I am on the same 100$ plan.

I am not sure adaptive thinking setting is relevant for this version but in the future that will help once they fix all the quota & cache issues. Seriously thinking about switching to Codex though. Gemini is far behind from what I have tried so far.

oldnewthing

6개월 전discuss

We were working on the data powering the Xbox console frontend for searches. For example, the metadata that powers a search like "romantic movie". The data was stored in Azure tables. We were all thinking about backup strategies for the data, serialization and deserialization etc. My suggestion was to simply create timestamped copies of the table. That is, if the table was X, the backup would be X_2026-01-18-14-25-00. This required no serialization and deserialization, could run entirely in memory and could shard the processing and was brutally fast. Also, by distributing the copies across multiple regions we could be more reliable. A simple and dumb solution vs a complex one :)

oldnewthing

7개월 전discuss

Claude Code is very good; good enough that I upgraded to the Max plan this week. However, it has a long way to go. It's great at one-shotting (with iterations) most ideas. However, it doesn't do as well when the task is complicated in an existing codebase. This weekend I migrated the backend for the SaaS I am building from Python to .NET Core. It did the migration but completely missed the conventions that the frontend was using to call the backend. While the converion itself went OK, every user journey was broken. I am still manually testing every code path and feeding in the errors to get Claude to fix it. My instructions were fairly comprehensive but Claude still missed most of it. My fault that I didn't generate tests first, but after this migration that's my first task.

oldnewthing

7개월 전discuss

Created modfin.lyfbits.com. Wrote it to help me model and determine various types of investment scenarios. Continuing to work on it. Not strictly vibe-coded. I use a brainstorm -> write specs with Gemini (requirements, APIs, user journeys, user experiences etc.) -> ask Claude to implement from Specs -> iterate and refine until it is exactly what I want it to be.

I have found that the initial specs only go so far; as I use, "what's missing" becomes clearer.

Workflow is build -> checkin to git -> build container -> deploy to Cloud Run. I have a number of instructions for Claude for logs, frontend, backend, logging etc. based on my past experience. Note that I am mostly a backend developer (AWS, Azure, GCP); I can't code frontend to save my life and on that front, the agents are helping me realize ideas rapidly.

oldnewthing

2년 전discuss

I believe the reason for divesting from the registrar business had to do more with ICANN rules that require Google not both be a registry operator and a registrar. Google does have a large registry business with 60+ TLDs so they could not also be a registrar (even if not for the same TLDs). It wasn’t really a money thing AFAIK.

oldnewthing

3년 전discuss

Paywalled article but ... IMO:

1) Software Engineers should follow structured processes and methods to solve problems. They might look different: state charts, sequence diagrams, formal methods, SDLC etc. However, they often don't because expediency wins over correctness. Where it does matter such as process control systems, embedded systems, they do follow these processes rigorously.

2) That said, there are a lot of folks who may not be aware of these methods because they didn't receive formal training. That is the beauty of our field; you don't need somebody to certify you if you can invent solutions and solve problems. I will refer you to what happened to the author of strongtowns.org. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/1/30/lawsuit-update.... So, no, I beg to differ. We don't need a board of wise old men lording it over the rest of us.

3) We are conversing on, reading the article via, accessing content over the Internet. This is public infrastructure. Without the software engineers who invented/built BGP, TCP/IP, SNMP, etc., we would not be able to do this.

oldnewthing

3년 전discuss

I tried porkbun. Really wanted it to work. Tried to transfer two domains to them from Google. For some reason, their payment system kept declining my perfectly fine Chase Visa card. It wasn't a problem with Chase. The transaction didn't even show up. There was no fraud notification etc. Gave up and moved to CloudFlare. I suspect they might need to fix payment services first.

oldnewthing

3년 전discuss

The 80386 System Software Writer’s Guide.

http://www.bitsavers.org/components/intel/80386/231499-001_8...

oldnewthing

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MCP with Keycloak, Claude, Codex and a Whole Lot of Coffee

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