I have a friend that is lucky enough to have retired at 40. A year ago he was adamant he'd never work again, having been burnt out from his time at big tech. Back then he was also an absolute AI hater and wouldn't listen to anyone who claimed LLMs were useful for programming.

He finally tried LLMs when Claude Opus 4.6 released and immediately changed his mind in the face of the overwhelming evidence that LLMs can in fact program pretty well. And now with the release of Fable 5 he's giddily creating all sorts of things that would have taken far too long to make prior to AI-accelerated software development. He actually plans to try and found his own business now. He's a very smart guy, so I hope he can make something interesting that people want.

There are a lot of AI doomers and haters. In person I mostly see people doing the same thing they've always done, but now saving time on various tasks. But this is the first time I've seen someone go from grumpy and checked out to giddy and optimistic thanks to LLMs.

My daughter (11) is doing a week long Python class, which is not using LLMs.

It got me thinking about how I learned to program in the pre-internet days (laboriously, from books), and then what a marvel it was when you could just search for information, especially for troubleshooting. But for her, the first answer in the Google search is going to be the AI summary, and most of her search tools are going to be AI tools.

I wonder if it would be possible to make an LLM that has a didactic/socratic mode. So if you said, "help me write a program to do madlibs" maybe it would give you a skeleton of a function, then prompt you to come to with a plan, then critique that plan. Or if you said, "I'm getting this error", it wouldn't just fix it, it would explain what the error means and nudge you towards the answer.

Thinking in a larger sense, it could have a rubric of important concepts, even tiers of understanding. It could be using the interactions to track the user's understanding, which could let it then tune how it answers future questions, or even be used to customize assignments.

I recognize that this is potentially replacing a teacher with a machine, which wouldn't be my goal. Good teachers are more holistic in their teaching than a machine is ever likely to be. But for people who don't have access to good teachers, or need more directed support than is available from a teacher, or just want to self study, it seems like it could be a valuable addition.

Until they solve the obsequiousness problem, it would be vulnerable to prompt hacking, so really more of a tool for someone who recognizes the value of learning over just being given the answer.

What do folks think about using such a tool? What would you want it to do, or not do?

Aside: I forgot until I reached the end of this post, but this is also (somewhat) the plot of The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrates Primer by Neal Stephenson.

I'm a web developer and find the playwright MCP to be genuinely useful. My LLM is able to navigate my site, measure the size of elements, see console errors, network requests, etc. This is the only MCP I've ever installed and haven't yet had any cause to use others. But I'm interested in hearing what other professionals are using.

Does anyone here have experience with Ruby programming? More specifically mRuby or DragonRuby for game programming?

I came across DragonRuby as free for its 7th anniversary and I’m considering checking it out, but I have no experience with the Ruby programming language itself.

Most of my programming experience recently is in C# and Python, but I have some experience with JavaScript/TypeScript.

Does anyone know of good resources for learning Ruby coming from that background, or thoughts on if it is worth it to try to pick up?

I’m not really interested in LLM-based Ruby workflows, at least until I have a decent grasp of the language and syntax myself.

Ive been playing around with learning a lisp language for a while, and I recently decided to go for it and learn fennel (as I already am comfortable with lua) just to see if I like lisps as a class. Normally, I try to do the first 5-10 days of a previous advent of code to pick up a lang.

Setting up my advent of code environment got me wondering: what projects do other people use to learn new languages/tooling? Id love to hear how other people approach learning a new skill.

I probably triggered some PTSD right there.

Was just in a meeting at work, where we listed off everything that makes software development hard and slow. An excersize for the thread would be to replicate that list. It turned out that Claude helps with like 1/5th or less of it....especially in a collaborative environment.

So, the situation we're now encountering is that random business areas can vibe code out something, tell nobody, throw it in AWS, have it become a critical part of a business process that fails when they quit, and nobody even has access to look at what was made.

It gives me comfort that in about 5 years there will be a new surge in demand for programmers to reign in all the rogue applications that need shutdown because of the immense risk to continual operation of a company, from data leaks to broken payroll.

It'll be Y2K all over again.

For a long time programmers have had two types of program verification tools, static analysis (like a compiler's checks) and dynamic analysis (running a test suite). I find myself using LLMs to analyze newly written code more and more. Even when they spit out a lot of false positives, I still find them to be a massive help. My workflow is something like this:

1. Commit my changes
2. Ask Claude Opus "Find problems with my latest commit"
3. Look though its list and skip over false positives.
4. Fix the true positives.
5. git add -A && git commit --amend --no-edit
6. Clear Claude's context
7. Back to step 2.

I repeat this loop until all of the issues Claude raises are dismissable. I know there are a lot of startups building a SaaS for things like this (CodeRabbit is one I've seen before, I didn't like it too much) but I feel just doing the above procedure is plenty good enough and catches a lot of issues that could take more time to uncover if raised by manual testing.

It's also been productive to ask for any problems in an entire repo. It will of course never be able to perform a completely thorough review of even a modestly sized application, but highlighting any problem at all is still useful.

Someone recently mentioned to me that they use vision-capable LLMs to perform "aesthetic tests" in their CI. The model takes screenshots of each page before and after a code change and throws an error if it thinks something is wrong.

I've been thinking a lot about LLM assisted development, and in particular why I keep dropping the available tools after a few attempts at using them.

I realized recently that it's taking away the part of software development I enjoy: the creative problem solving that comes with writing code. What's left is code review tasks, testing, security checks, etc. Important tasks, but they all primarily involve heavy concentration, and much less creativity.

Why aren't agents focused on handling the mundane tasks instead? Tell me if I've just introduced a security vulnerability or a runtime bug. Generate realistic test data and give me info on what the likely output would be. Tell me that the algorithm I just wrote is O(n^2).

Those tasks are so much more applicable to matching against existing data, something LLMs should be extremely good at, rather than trying to get them to write something novel, which so far they've been mostly bad at, at least in my experience.

I relatively recently reinstalled my OS (distro-hopping to Fedora KDE) and as I was installing my various everyday programs, I began to wonder whether there were any solid competitors to VSCode in the space other than IntelliJ products (which I strongly dislike compared to VSCode already). I've used VSCode for a while, but I've definitely noticed my experience with the app getting a little bloated and overwhelmed. But I'm not keeping my finger on the pulse of new IDEs, so I don't know if there's anything new (or at least a solid alternative of some sort) out there that people are switching to.

I'm on Linux, so nothing Mac-exclusive. I know VSCode's extension library is probably hard to match given its popularity, but I'd hope for an alternative that at least has potential to have extensions to cover lesser-known languages and file formats for me. I liked the look and feel of VS Code when I switched to it years ago, so I'm all for apps with similar vibes, but I'd like something that feels faster and more focused.

Please don't recommend vim. I've already heard of vim, and if I wanted to switch to it I would have already.

I've made the decision to purchase a new M5 Macbook Air because of the memorypocalypse. My current M1 model is already upgraded to the amount of memory and storage as the current base model and I'm wondering if it's worth spending the extra 2-4 hundred dollars on memory upgrades today.

My current computer is more than good enough for today but I figure I should probably future proof just in case. I was thinking the 16GB would be enough, but I also know that I'm kind of falling behind by not embracing AI coding agents. According to my research the maximum 32GB is recommended for most coding-relevant models - almost as a minimum.

I work in education so coding is not actually much of a need, and obviously there are cloud providers I could use if I end up needing them in the future. I also have less than a teacher's salary because I work part time, which is the greatest reason why I'm sticking with the 16GB base for the moment, but other than that I also don't do many memory-intensive programs. But I thought I would get some recommendations before they start shipping.

I'd also be interested on people's opinions on trading in my old one, since it'll only get me ~$275 back. I'm considering reneging on that part and keeping it around to act as a web server or give it to my husband who has a computer that still runs Windows 7 and barely uses it.

I've grown increasingly unsure about if I'll stay with this profession long term thanks to the AI "revolution". Not because I think I'll be replaced, I have an extremely wide set of skills thanks to working over a decade in small startups so I think I'm safe for a long while to come.

No, I've grown weary because an increasingly larger share of the code that we produce is expected to be ai generated and with it shorter timelines and I just plain don't like it. I think we reached a tipping point around Claude opus 4.5 where it really is capable and that's only going to continue to get better. But damnit I like coding, I enjoy the problem solving and I feel that's getting stripped away from me basically overnight. Also, as these models become more and more capable I think the number of companies vibe coding to a product with fields of junior level engineers is going to grow which is going to push down senior job opportunities and wages.

So now I'm left wondering if it's time to start pointing towards a new career. I really love building stuff and solving problems so maybe I go back to school and switch to some other flavor of engineering? Idk. Curious where other's heads are at with this.

What projects would you think would interest my daughters the most? The oldest is 11 years, super creative and builds the most intricate stuff out of plain paper, tape and cardboard. I have learned programming from about her age, but feel like software would not catch her attention the same way hardware would. They already experiment with programming and microbits in school (what a truly lucky generation!!!).

I am looking for stuff that is not too complicated/expensive that it will just collect dust on a shelf because it took a lot of time to build. Specifically I would like to try something that could be dismantled and reused for other projects. Maybe a barcode scanner or something that has a connection with real life applications.