My 55lb German Shepherd / Husky mutt is an absolutely wonderful dog with one fatal flaw: he is deathly afraid of my irrigation system.

From inside the house, he can sense when the valves open and starts panicking before water even starts spraying. He starts running, pacing, hyperventilating, and generally won’t settle. I sit with him and pet him and try to calm him but he won’t relax until the cycle is done.

This is so much of a problem that I simply didn’t run irrigation last year or the year before.

I’ve tried desensitizing him by sitting outside with him and running one of the zones, sitting inside and running a zone, or walking him around the block while I run the sprinklers so that it’s not a surprise when they turn on. I’ve tried showering him with treats, letting him go hide wherever he wants, working on his tricks, and singing to him. Nothing seems to work.

He never chews up the system or shows aggression to it. He knows where the heads are and avoids them in the yard.

More broadly, he doesn’t like being in or around water. He’s good at taking baths. He will get up on the tub and stand there quietly, but he will be shaking and stressed. If we take him to the lake or pool, he will get in the water after a ton of encouragement (and then he proceeds to love the water).

Does anyone have advice for dealing with this kind of behavior?

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This is the sixth Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twenty-sixth overall. We are discussing How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Wexler.. At the end of July we will discuss A Psalm for the Wild Built by Chambers.

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I'm running out of content and need some help. Some of my notable favorites:

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The eclipse is over! Dracula is sealed. Again. Kinda? Who knows, man, this was a weird bout for him. Nostradamus has gotta have some more stuff in the tank for another Belmont, but for now let's just enjoy all the Axe Armor souls we farmed.

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Complete off the top of my head thing, no source/research, just anecdotes and pontificating.

As i've been doing some heavy editing today of a 300+ line SQL query, one thing I'm wondering about with these AI usage stats are how much of the "adoption" falls into things like intellisense suggestions.

There's two parts to this, with the first being just bad suggestions.

I've found them to be "okay" for something like F#, but for SQL, which has always required me to knife fight for an alias to begin with, they're just utter garbage.

I normally don't blow through my free github copilot suggestions in my month (I'm not in the code mines as much anyways), but I blew through it in a day of shitty SQL suggestions (and then just turned it off). This was last month, so not even while dealing with the current monster, and I'm left wondering how many people just have it vomit out useless stuff they change anyways.

The second part, is just the usual "you don't really know your tools".

While doing this query I considered turning it back on or using it. I have several CTE's for readability as this is a prototype but it necessitates an annoying pattern of taking the names of your columns, uplifting them to the next query select, and then summing and renaming them AGAIN such as SUM(COALESCE(a.example,0)) AS [example]

When you have 84 columns to do this with, it can be tempting to let AI notice the pattern and just do it. However it's not actually necessary, and now that they're clocking the tokens as we knew they would, I'm back to just using my multi line editor skills. Middle click select, some home/end to get a starting point, then ctrl+shift+arrows mixed with Alt+arrows and some copy paste and I'm mostly done. Few Ctrl + D's or straight up find and replaces and I'd edited 80 lines in maybe 30 seconds?

AI would've been a bit easier, and from what i've seen of MANY coders, something I suspect they only think is doable through AI. However much like how AI is getting people to use features they never even knew existed in their business tools, I wonder how much adoption on the coder side is the same. All these text editor helper tools many coders don't use (please keep all VIM manifestos under 400 pages) suddenly being automated out by the VASTLY more expensive AI.

And like some of the other AI solutions, as the money starts to hit the budgets, I think we'll see a lot more "Look you need to learn how to do this normally" (or "hey guess what we're removing from VS code!").

Not sure I have an overall point to this, but I'd be curious to hear what other people are seeing in their environments.