Weekly Brain Dump #39
At a Glance
- Begrudgingly Agentic I've been pushed to adopt agentic development
- Interesting Links Cool things I found this week
- Comments
Begrudgingly Agentic
I had a weird coincidence happen that I’m kind of happy it did happen because if it hadn’t I think my brain would have flipped and been a jerk.
I was dabbling with local LLMs trying out agentic programming because I have heard so much about it and so many people claim it’s amazing. I felt I must have been missing out on something. I did have some fun with it, “I’ve” built a little personal assistant that uses a local LLM, it’s kind of alright but definitely not a smooth experience.
The big coincidence though was about a week after I started this experiment I got the news at work that I need to pick up Claude code and start using it “to be more efficient”.
I think if it hadn’t been my choice to start playing with this style of development my brain would have absolutely chucked a fit. There’s a chance I would have just quit my job then and there.
Honestly, I get the appeal. Claude can absolutely smash out code and then it’s just reviewing it. It really does remind me of when I was a team lead to a bunch of enthusiastic juniors.
I can see how it’s addictive, when I started it was so magic. I just type “make me feature X” and maybe an hour later it’d have it done for me, even if the code was dog shit. I found myself poking my laptop until late in the night and when I was away from home I was checking in over SSH on my phone. I’ve had to put a hard limit on myself for when I stop touching my computer.
I think I’m getting the hang of Claude for work. It requires me being able to explain what I want clearly, checking in regularly to confirm it’s not looping or going down a rabbit hole, and thoroughly reviewing the code.
I think my best tip, would be to install git-delta for reviewing code from the terminal easily. This has helped me out quite a bit.
I still don’t love this “new world” of coding. I’m going to keep crafting code by hand outside of work as I find it a lot of fun. I’m pretty tempted to take a day off a month to do my own things and stream it. I need to even out the feeling of betraying my ethics using these genuinely evil tools daily.
This has been more of a ramble than expected. If you read this, I’m sorry. It’s a mess but I had to get it off my chest. It’s been a big part of my poor mental health this past 2~ weeks.
Interesting Links
Static ActivityPub Publishing: Very cool, I want to learn more about ActivityPub.
Jellyfin 12.0: I love Jellyfin and I'm glad to see it hit a major milestone!