Mastodawn

Lobsters is full of think pieces processing the authors’ deep blue. I don’t have the time and will to read them all, but it seems I will have to process the topic myself instead of just deferring.

(I haven’t used any “coding agent” at all, and for the start of the year I’ve been in a bad loop having estimated that I’d have a thing done by mid January while actually landing it with known open follow-up issues this week.)

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sayrer Mar 14

@hsivonen just try claude code. tell it something that is bugging you but you've been putting off. then tell it to make a plan. good way to get unstuck

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sayrer Mar 14

@hsivonen here you go, this YC guy just said the same thing. I find these LLMs come up with terrible ideas, but they do not get stuck.

https://x.com/snowmaker/status/2032894926896464377

Jared Friedman (@snowmaker) on X

I realized something else AI has changed about coding: you don't get stuck anymore. Programming used to be punctuated by episodes of extreme frustration, when a tricky bug ground things to a halt. That doesn't happen anymore.

X (formerly Twitter)

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Henri Sivonen Mar 14

@sayrer Oh, I didn’t misestimate the time to landing-readiness due to lack of ideas. And I didn’t mean to imply that agents would have allowed me to land sooner: Just that I’ve been too busy to take a good look at other stuff.

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sayrer Mar 14

@hsivonen that's right in there too. I explained it to Tim this way: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/02/06/Q-Plus-C-Ch1#p-6

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sayrer Mar 14

@hsivonen so, even if you don't let these things write a single line of code (and I sometimes don't), you can just leave Claude Code open and say "where are we on this?"

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sayrer Mar 14

@hsivonen So, if you take some complicated task like your work in character encoding, it's an advanced form of leaving a bug in with a printf, so you remember where to pick up the next morning.

This is much more interesting to me than vibe-coding some ugly purple e-commerce site.

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sayrer

@hsivonen I sent https://github.com/unicode-org/icu4x/pull/7779, because that actually does look like a bug. That is from 10 minutes of Claude, but I do know my Rust and Unicode, so not in novice hands.

Fix UB: use || instead of && by sayrer · Pull Request #7779 · unicode-org/icu4x

in cast_bytes_to_slice alignment/length check The condition guarding from_raw_parts joined the alignment check and length check with &&, meaning the error was only returned when both were w...

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