I stopped drinking 8 or 9 years ago, and I haven’t missed it. Not that it ever was a problem, I enjoyed a glass of wine or a cocktail every now and then, but I was training for an ultra marathon and figured I’d stay dry while I trained for a couple of months. Had a glass of wine a few days after the race and felt completely hammered, at which point I realized if I wanted to drink again I’d have to “train” my body for it, and thought that was totally backwards. I haven’t found any situation where an alcoholic drink can’t be replaced by a glass of water, an NA beer or a mocktail. I’m also very lucky to be married to a wonderful woman who arrived to more or less the same conclusion and we enjoy being the boring ones who don’t drink (but never get a hangover).
I’ve been training an alphazero style model for an abstract strategy game I created 20 years ago. It’s been really fun learning about MCTS and figuring out how to optimize all parts of the pipeline to be able to train on ~millions of moves for ~hundreds of dollars.
I grew up in France and started smoking before age 15, and was a heavy smoker (1 pack a day) until I quit when I was 27 after moving to the US. Getting out of an environment where smoking was normalized is what helped me take that step.
Smoking is terrible in that it really messes with your brain, you intellectually know all the reasons why you should quit but it’s so easy to put it off. “I can quit whenever, I just don’t want to”. Until you try and get that gnawing yearning feeling.
It took me a solid year to not feel that way all the time. And another two to not feel that when having a coffee/glass of wine/standing next to someone else smoking.
13 years later I’m completely over it, to the point where I can barely tolerate being in the vicinity of someone smoking. And yet I often have dreams where I light a cigarette.
If you’re thinking of quitting, there is no better way than today. It’s likely going to be hard, but it’s one of the best things you can do to yourself. You already know that of course, but hopefully this helps.
Looking at the prompts op has shared, I'd recommend more aggressively managing/trimming the context. In general you don't give the agent a new task without /clearing the context before. This will enable the agent to be more focused on the new task, and decrease its bias (if eg. reviewing changes it has made previously).
The overall approach I now have for medium sized task is roughly:
- Ask the agent to research a particular area of the codebase that is relevant to the task at hand, listing all relevant/important files, functions, and putting all of this in a "research.md" markdown file.
- Clear the context window
- Ask the agent to put together a project plan, informed by the previously generated markdown file. Store that project plan in a new "project.md" markdown file. Depending on complexity I'll generally do multiple revs of this.
- Clear the context window
- Ask the agent to create a step by step implementation plan, leveraging the previously generated research & project files, put that in a plan.md file.
- Clear the context window
- While there are unfinished steps in plan.md:
-- While the current step needs more work
--- Ask the agent to work on the current step
--- Clear the context window
--- Ask the agent to review the changes
--- Clear the context window
-- Ask the agent to update the plan with their changes and make a commit
-- Clear the context window
I also recommend to have specialized sub agents for each of those phases (research, architecture, planning, implementation, review). Less so in terms of telling the agent what to do, but as a way to add guardrails and structure to the way they synthesize/serialize back to markdown.
In the last 50 years, software has morphed from a hobbyist pursuit, to a nerdy subculture, to a trillion+ dollars industry. This has caused a pretty significant mix shift in the software developer community: the reason driving the mean developer into this field in 2025 is very different from that of the 2015 developer, and that of the 2005 developer.
Arguably there might be more curious tinkerers nowadays, but they might represent a smaller slice of the pie.
This is awesome! I’ve been working on and off for the last few months on an AI running coach app. Would love to compare notes of effectively prompting Claude or O3 to analyze workouts / build workout plans. In my experience it still requires a lot of hand holding (sudden mileage increases w/w, inconsistent intervals, etc)
I wanted something minimalist but high contrast, and enough variety so charts would not be repetitive. I have a thing for data visualization, so I pulled inspiration from the pile of books I have on my bookshelf.
It’s changed over time: I first used MapMyRun with my iPhone, then switched to Strava on the iPhone, then got a garmin, and nowadays an Apple Watch. I’m super grateful for Strava to exist, if only as a repo of all my workouts.
Unfortunately my treadmill runs don’t have GPS data associated with them. Austria, PR and Hawaii were places where I ran mostly in the gym.
This being said, Sweden is a fun one: I was in Copenhagen for a few weeks and I thought it’d be fun to take the train to Malmo, do my long run, and then take the train back. All that to say, I’ve spent 3h30 in Sweden, 3h05 of which I was running.
Having experienced them, those runs were surprisingly not awful. In such cases I’ll jog a very slow mile, paying really close attention to what my body tells me (if I can walk, I can shuffle a mile or so). If anything, the act of getting out of the house and accomplishing something has more than once given me a morale and energy boost while sick.
The actually awful runs I’ve had are more of the "type 2 fun" kind (running in the desert, grueling trail runs), or the occasional hungover run before I quit drinking.
I’ve been lucky to never have any real knee issues. The only period I ended up with a little knee pain was because of a poor running shoe choice, and it resolved when I got properly fitted and changed shoes. Hope you figure out the source of your troubles!
Not AFib thankfully, I had a few sporadic SVTs while running (it’s however unclear whether exercise was the original cause, or if it was congenital and started manifesting while running).
Thankfully the ablation took care of them and I haven’t had an episode in a few years.
I’m making a baby book for my son Henri featuring famous Henri’s through history.
I’m also building a zigbee free/busy eink display that only needs to powered once a year or so