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.

Increasingly I'm looking at my backup solution and I'm not totally happy. My "threat model" I guess is if the house burns down and we only make it out with the shirts on our backs. Alternatively if I get hit by a bus I'd like a backup of passwords and maybe some instructions for my wife.

TL;DR What are decent medium term cold storage options for < 1gb that I can be really sure will be good for several years (maybe 10 or 20 years at the extreme end) and is fairly cheap. I was thinking optical media but I'm kind of lost as to what specifically to get and how to not get conned by buying fake media (m discs). I (somewhat randomly) have an m disc drive in my computer but I don't know if thats overkill or not? My important stuff may even fit on a CD actually...

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.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Hey guys, I hope this is the right place to post.

So my adhd hyperfixation has recently shifted towards an idea for a game and I want to indulge my ADHD by learning all I can about game development to see if I can achieve this idea to the point that maybe I can put it in "Early Access" to fund even more resources on it.

But I'm not sure where to start. I'm looking into Godot because it's free and open source and has a lot of community resources, but also wanted to see if anyone had any ideas here.

I have some coding experience, a lot of technical experience and pick things up extremely quickly.

The basic idea is that it's a 2D Sidescrolling RPG, but with Match-3 "Candy Crush"-esque mechanics for battles and fighting.

Anyways, I'd love any advice or resources. Or if you'd like to help out or discuss the game idea more I'm up for that too.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?