La Vita Nouva

Pic - April 05, 2026

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#10)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:10:00 +0000

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#9)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:09:00 +0000

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#8)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:08:00 +0000

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#7)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:07:00 +0000

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#6)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:06:00 +0000

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#5)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:05:00 +0000

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#4)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:04:00 +0000

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#3)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:03:00 +0000

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#2)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:02:00 +0000

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#1)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:01:00 +0000

Pic - April 03, 2026

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

al-Jabri

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

al-Jabri

I had some questions about al-Jabri and I missed having connection to people who I might share with them my questions.

Reading leaked Claude Code source code

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reading leaked Claude Code source code

This post was discussed in Lobsters

Interesting findings from reading 132,000 lines of TypeScript that power Claude Code. The post uses the repo at https://github.com/chatgptprojects/claude-code to reference code, note that it might go down by the time you are reading this.

[2026-04-01 Wed 00:53]: after writing this, I found another interesting read by Alex Kim's blog

Anthropic accidentally leaked a source map file (cli.js.map) containing the full, unobfuscated TypeScript source code. 1,897 files around 132,000 LOC. What I found is a piece of software that is surprisingly more opinionated and more paranoid than I expected. Here are some of things that I found worth talking about.

The codename canary problem

In src/buddy/types.ts, all the species names are hex-encoded:

const c = String.fromCharCode
export const duck = c(0x64,0x75,0x63,0x6b) as 'duck'
export const goose = c(0x67,0x6f,0x6f,0x73,0x65) as 'goose'

All 18 species, spelled out character by character in hexadecimal. The comment explains a funny reason:

One species name collides with a model-codename canary in excluded-strings.txt. The check greps build output (not source), so runtime-constructing the value keeps the literal out of the bundle while the check stays armed for the actual codename.

So somewhere in Anthropic's build pipeline there's a file called excluded-strings.txt that contains codenames for unreleased models, and a build check that greps the output to make sure none of them leaked into the public build. One of the companion species names happens to match one of these internal codenames. Rather than rename the species, they encoded all of them uniformly in hex so the literal string never appears in the compiled output.

I find this hilarious. Somewhere inside Anthropic, a model is codenamed after an animal that's also a companion species in Claude Code, and the solution is to write "duck" as 0x64,0x75,0x63,0x6b. For the record I don't think the conflicting species is actually "duck" (that would be too simple), but the comment says they encoded all of them uniformly so you can't tell which one it is. Clever.

`goodClaude`, `bughunter` and other internal commands

The commands file has a section of internal-only commands that are hidden in external builds: bughunter, commitPushPr, ctx_viz, goodClaude (which is disabled and hidden, we will never know what it did), ultraplan, ultrareview, teleport, and ant-trace. These exist only in Anthropic's internal build.

There's also a rich set of feature flags for experimental modes: PROACTIVE (autonomous agent), KAIROS (an assistant/brief mode), COORDINATOR_MODE (multi-agent orchestration where Claude spawns worker agents), AGENT_TRIGGERS (cron job scheduling for agents), VOICE_MODE, and BUDDY (the companion pets). The coordinator mode is particularly interesting because it explicitly tells the orchestrating agent: "Never write 'based on your findings' or 'based on the research.' These phrases delegate understanding to the worker instead of doing it yourself." Whoever wrote that has seen too many LLM responses that start with "Based on my findings…"

`import I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_CODE_OR_FILEPATHS`

In src/query.ts, line 24, there's this import:

import {
 logEvent,
 type AnalyticsMetadata_I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_CODE_OR_FILEPATHS,
} from 'src/services/analytics/index.js'

This is a TypeScript type and its name is a sentence. Every developer who uses it must type out "I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_CODE_OR_FILEPATHS" as part of their code. It's a forcing function as you can't accidentally send file paths or code content to analytics without literally typing "I verified this is not code or filepaths."

Multi-Clauding analytics

The /insights command includes a section called "Multi-Clauding (Parallel Sessions)." The function detectMultiClauding() uses a sliding window algorithm to find the pattern: session1 -> session2 -> session1 within a 30-minute window. It counts and reports these as "overlap events."

I think they're tracking when you're running multiple Claude sessions simultaneously and reporting it as a usage metric.

2,600 lines of preventing rm -rf

The bash security system (bashSecurity.ts, 2,592 lines) is pure paranoia, and it's fascinating. It validates every shell command against a checklist of attack patterns.

Some highlights of what it checks for:

Zsh's =cmd expansion, where =curl evil.com expands to /usr/bin/curl evil.com, bypassing permission rules because the parser sees "=curl" as the command name, not "curl"
zmodload (gateway to zsh/mapfile which enables invisible file I/O)
Heredoc injection, with a full line-by-line matching algorithm that replicates bash's heredoc-closing behavior
Shell ANSI-C quoting ($'\x41') because it can encode arbitrary characters
Process substitution in both directions (<() and >())
emulate (eval-equivalent arbitrary code execution in zsh)
ztcp (TCP exfiltration through Zsh builtins)

There's a separate file for destructive command warnings that pattern-matches things like git reset --hard ("may discard uncommitted changes"), rm -rf ("may recursively force-remove files"), DROP TABLE, and kubectl delete ("may delete Kubernetes resources"), each with a human-readable warning explaining what you're about to lose. And all of this is replicated for PowerShell in a separate file that tracks alias hijacking, module loading, and script block cmdlets.

There's a comment "This is really ugly but our current Tool type doesn't make it easy" in the MCP utility code, which feels honest, however I would say the security code is obsessive and thorough in a way that suggests real incidents behind every check, rather than ugly (code is generally ugly, arguably).

YOLO

Claude Code has a permission system with five modes: default (asks for permission), acceptEdits (auto-allows file editing), dontAsk (blocks everything), bypassPermissions (allows everything), and auto. The auto mode uses an ML-based classifier to decide whether a tool call is safe to run without asking the user, and internally, the file that implements this classifier is called yoloClassifier.ts (1,495 lines), I find this funny because; the classifier performs a two-stage evaluation: a fast initial decision, then an extended reasoning step if needed. It tracks which stage made the decision, cache metrics, token usage, and whether the decision was overridden. Now, the fact that they built an actual thoughtful safety system and named it "yolo" is so hilarious to me.

A complete Vim implementation, from scratch

src/vim/ contains a full Vim keybinding implementation as a state machine. Not a wrapper around a library. A hand-rolled state machine with INSERT and NORMAL modes, operators (delete, change, yank; 556 lines), motions (h/j/k/l, w/b/e, W/B/E, 0/^/$, G), text objects (words, quotes, brackets, braces), find motions (f/F/t/T with repeat via ;/,), indent/outdent, join lines, replace, toggle case, and dot-repeat. The transitions file (490 lines) handles the full state machine logic.

The motions are pure functions and operators handle smart newline logic. There's a register system with linewise detection. Having went through many Vim (and "evil", in case of Emacs) plugins myself, honestly this is a more complete Vim implementation than most "Vim mode/evil packages" plugins I've used, and it's very impressive.

If ye does not heed

The query orchestration loop (src/query.ts, 1,729 lines) contains this comment at line 151:

/**
 * The rules of thinking are lengthy and fortuitous. They require plenty
 * of thinking of most long duration and deep meditation for a wizard to
 * wrap one's noggin around.
 *
 * The rules follow:
 * 1. A message that contains a thinking or redacted_thinking block must
 * be part of a query whose max_thinking_length > 0
 * 2. A thinking block may not be the last message in a block
 * 3. Thinking blocks must be preserved for the duration of an assistant
 * trajectory
 *
 * Heed these rules well, young wizard. For they are the rules of
 * thinking, and the rules of thinking are the rules of the universe.
 * If ye does not heed these rules, ye will be punished with an entire
 * day of debugging and hair pulling.
 */

There are three rules about how thinking blocks must be handled in the API, and apparently they caused so much suffering that someone chose to document them in medieval English as a warning to future developers. "If ye does not heed these rules, ye will be punished with an entire day of debugging and hair pulling", and the line directly below this comment is ironically const MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS_RECOVERY_LIMIT = 3. I imagine this constant was born from exactly such a day.

You have a pet

There's a directory called src/buddy/. It implements a companion pet system, complete with species, rarity tiers, stats, ASCII art sprites with idle animations, hats, and eye styles.

Your user ID is hashed (using Mulberry32, a tiny PRNG that has the beautiful comment "good enough for picking ducks") and deterministically rolled into a companion. The species list includes duck, goose, blob, cat, dragon, octopus, owl, penguin, turtle, snail, ghost, axolotl, capybara, cactus, robot, rabbit, mushroom, and "chonk" (see the full species array).

Each companion has a rarity (common 60%, uncommon 25%, rare 10%, epic 4%, legendary 1%), and rarity determines whether your buddy can get a hat. Common buddies always go hatless. Uncommon and above roll from the HATS array, which includes crown, tophat, propeller, halo, wizard hat, beanie, or a "tinyduck", which is apparently a tiny duck sitting on top of your ASCII animal. The array also includes "none" though, so your epic companion might still go bald.

Each companion has five stats: DEBUGGING, PATIENCE, CHAOS, WISDOM, and SNARK. There's always one peak stat and one dump stat, just like D&D character generation. Legendary companions have a floor of 50 in all stats while common ones start at 5.

The architecture is split into "bones" and "soul". Bones (species, rarity, stats, eyes, hat, shininess) are deterministic from your user ID and regenerated every time, so you cannot edit your config file to fake a legendary rarity. The soul (name and personality) is generated once by the model and stored. There's even a shiny boolean with a 1% chance, like shiny Pokémon.

The sprites themselves are defined as 5x12 ASCII art grids with 3 frames of animation each. The cat goes:

 /\_/\
 ( · · )
 ( ω )
 (")_(")

And in frame 2 it wiggles its tail: (")_(")~. The dragon breathes little tildes () in its third frame. The [[https://github.com/chatgptprojects/claude-code/blob/main/src/buddy/sprites.ts#L142-L164][octopus]] alternates between ~/\/\/\/\ and \/\/\/\/ tentacle positions. It's the kind of detail that makes you realize someone on the team was having a genuinely good time.

The companion sits beside the input box and "occasionally comments in a speech bubble." The system prompt instructs Claude not to pretend to be the companion or narrate what it might say, because the companion is handled separately. When the user addresses the companion by name, Claude is told to "stay out of the way: respond in ONE line or less."

The whole thing is behind a feature flag called BUDDY and almost nobody knows it exists.

Other things worth mentioning

Some things that I didn't cover in detail but are still worth knowing:

The loading spinner randomly selects from 186 verbs including "Clauding", "Flibbertigibbeting", "Boondoggling", "Prestidigitating", "Photosynthesizing", "Shenaniganing", "Whatchamacalliting", and "Tomfoolering". When it finishes, it uses past tense verbs (many cooking-themed, like "Sautéed" and "Baked", plus some like "Cogitated" and "Crunched"), so you might see "Sautéed for 12s". You can extend or replace the spinner list in your settings.
There's a /stickers command that opens your browser to stickermule.com/claudecode. That's the whole command.
The team memory sync system describes its conflict resolution strategy as "the lesser evil" because local edits overwrite the server version, but the alternative (silently discarding local work) is worse.
The keyboard parser handles both Kitty and XTerm extended key protocols and has special code paths for SSH tunnels where TERM_PROGRAM isn't forwarded. #Programming

Repeat Emacs

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Repeat Emacs

It's been said that every editor is destined to repeat Emacs. I extend that to, every computer software is destined to repeat Emacs. #Emacs #Programming

Doctors in Gaza.

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Doctors in Gaza.

Israel’s Deadly Blockade Traps 7 Doctors in Gaza. I think a lot about doctors who are in Gaza, their story, oh what story they have to tell. #Israel

Adaptation. (2002)

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Adaptation. (2002)

Charlie Kaufman writes a film about failing to write a film about a book about orchids. He put his actual neuroses on screen; the self-loathing and the conviction that anything authentic must also be uncommercial. Then he invented a twin brother who is everything he wishes he could be. Confident, productive, happy.

The third act surrenders to every convention Charlie spent the whole film refusing. Car chases, drug dealers, death. You can feel his horror at his own script. But that's the adaptation. Not of the book. Of himself. Purity is a prison and the refusal to compromise is its own cowardice. Donald dies and Charlie finishes the screenplay, and the film you're watching is the proof. #Cinema

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Everything in this film is a construction: the girlfriend, the drive, the parents, the farmhouse. All of it is memory being revised by someone who has already given up. The "young woman" keeps changing because she was never real. She's every version of a life the janitor never lived: the physicist, the poet, the painter. All the people he could have spoken to but didn't.

The old man watching the young couple through frosted glass. The parents aging and de-aging. The empty school. It amounts to one long, quiet accounting of what was lost by being too afraid. The title is not a metaphor. #Cinema

Magnolia (1999)

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Magnolia (1999)

Three hours of people drowning and none of them know how to ask for help. Earl Partridge dying and unable to undo decades of absence. Frank Mackey performing masculinity so aggressively it takes a while to realize it's grief. Claudia can't stop destroying herself. All of them connected by threads they can't see.

Then it rains frogs. Which is either absurd or honest, because sometimes the world is so stuck that nothing short of something biblical can interrupt it. The frogs don't explain anything. They just make everyone stop. And in that pause, some of them find enough to start again. #Cinema

Make macOS 26 consistently bad (unironically)

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Make macOS 26 consistently bad (unironically)

This post was discussed in HackerNews

Alongside the various bugs you get, one of the issues of upgrading to MacOS 26 is that it has one of the most notorious inconsistency issues in window corners. I'm not sure what exactly pushes product designers to like the excessive roundness¹. I believe that UI design is the most influencive² field ever since designers just try to follow whatever big companies do (in fact I see this a lot in my work, when two designers are having an argument, one of them would resolve it to, let's see how Apple draw that button), which means that we are probably going to see this ugly effect elsewhere very soon.

Anyway, recently I had to upgrade to macOS 26. And I found the edges ugly, like everyone else did. However, what's even uglier, is the inconsistency. Many people try to resolve this by disabling MacOS system integrity protection, which results in making them possibly vulnerable³. The reason why you need to disable SIP, is that to edit the dynamic libraries that system apps like Safari (which has crazy bad corners) use, you need to edit system libraries that exist the root. To me though, I don't find the corners so bad, but I find the inconsistency very annoying. So I think a better solution to this is; instead of making everything roundless, make everything more rounded, which requires you to edit only user apps (i.e. no SIP disabling needed). I forked a solution that makes things roundless to modify it to have my approach. It's simply as follows:

#import <AppKit/AppKit.h>
#import <objc/runtime.h>

static CGFloat kDesiredCornerRadius = 23.0;

static double swizzled_cornerRadius(id self, SEL _cmd) {
 return kDesiredCornerRadius;
}

static double swizzled_getCachedCornerRadius(id self, SEL _cmd) {
 return kDesiredCornerRadius;
}

static CGSize swizzled_topCornerSize(id self, SEL _cmd) {
 return CGSizeMake(kDesiredCornerRadius, kDesiredCornerRadius);
}

static CGSize swizzled_bottomCornerSize(id self, SEL _cmd) {
 return CGSizeMake(kDesiredCornerRadius, kDesiredCornerRadius);
}

__attribute__((constructor))
static void init(void) {
 // Only apply to third-party GUI apps; skip CLI tools, daemons, and Apple system apps
 NSString *bid = [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundleIdentifier];
 if (!bid || [bid hasPrefix:@"com.apple."]) return;

 Class cls = NSClassFromString(@"NSThemeFrame");
 if (!cls) return;

 Method m1 = class_getInstanceMethod(cls, @selector(_cornerRadius));
 if (m1) method_setImplementation(m1, (IMP)swizzled_cornerRadius);

 Method m2 = class_getInstanceMethod(cls, @selector(_getCachedWindowCornerRadius));
 if (m2) method_setImplementation(m2, (IMP)swizzled_getCachedCornerRadius);

 Method m3 = class_getInstanceMethod(cls, @selector(_topCornerSize));
 if (m3) method_setImplementation(m3, (IMP)swizzled_topCornerSize);

 Method m4 = class_getInstanceMethod(cls, @selector(_bottomCornerSize));
 if (m4) method_setImplementation(m4, (IMP)swizzled_bottomCornerSize);
}

Then compile, sign, and store:

clang -arch arm64e -arch x86_64 -dynamiclib -framework AppKit \
 -o SafariCornerTweak.dylib \
 SafariCornerTweak.m

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/
sudo cp SafariCornerTweak.dylib /usr/local/lib/
sudo codesign -f -s - /usr/local/lib/SafariCornerTweak.dylib
cp com.local.dyld-inject.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.local.dyld-inject.plist

You can have this plist too to load it in once your computer loads:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
 "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>com.local.dyld-inject</string>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
 <string>launchctl</string>
 <string>setenv</string>
 <string>DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES</string>
 <string>/usr/local/lib/SafariCornerTweak.dylib</string>
 </array>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Load it:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.local.dyld-inject.plist

Now at least everything is consistently bad. #Programming

Footnotes

One of the ugliest roundness examples I've ever seen is the current one in the YouTube UI design

that's to say, contagious form inwards

Arguable, since you just lose security over /root, which is not a big deal if someone already gained access to your machine, at least for me. Edit: I learnt that this is not the case from comments, however, I still believe that if you're already pwned, SIP can't do much there.

arpeggios in circle of fifths

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

arpeggios in circle of fifths

Today I found a tiktoker playing arpeggios in circle of fifths, and claiming that she composed it by herself.

How camera works

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How camera works

TIL how a camera works What is a pinhole camera? #Science

Little Known Development Methods (2009)

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Little Known Development Methods (2009)

Following post is by programmer and once-active HN contributor Ed Weissman (Profile: edw519), I found it while going through his "The Best of edw519", it dates to 2009, and I thought it will be worth looking at again. Comments are mine and were not included in the original post.

Garbage Perpetuation Development (GPD) — You can’t believe how bad the existing code base is, but you’re afraid to open a can of worms, so everything you add to it is written in the same style. For the rest of your life, you can say, “It was like that when I got here.”

Eighteen years later and this is somehow more relevant, not less. what nobody saw coming is that now we have LLMs-based coding assistants trained on the entire internet, which means they’ve ingested billions of lines of GPD-produced code and will cheerfully suggest the same patterns right back at you. I remember reading a darkly funny thread on this from Simon Willison, or someone on Twitter, where they note that Copilot and friends are essentially the world’s most confident GPD practitioner, i.e. they’ll mirror whatever style surrounds them without judgment.

· · ·

Mansion in the Quicksand Development (MQD) — The opposite of Garbage Perpetuation Development, you are so shocked by the poor quality of the existing code that you vow that you’d rather swallow razor blades that code the same way. So you write a tight beautiful refactored masterpiece that will crash as soon as the underlying database loses its integrity (later tonight).

Joel Spolsky’s 2000 post “Things You Should Never Do, Part I” was already making this point about Netscape’s catastrophic rewrite, and yet we keep doing it. I believe the reason this pattern persists is that the beautiful new code feels like progress (I personally still like how the git blame shows my name next to clean principled work) and the rotten foundation is invisible until it isn’t. The 2022-era wave of “we’re migrating from our monolith to microservices” produced a fresh epidemic of this, stunning new service boundaries built on top of a PostgreSQL schema that hadn’t been touched since 2009 and was quietly on fire.

· · ·

Defer to the Framework Development (DFD) — You’re not sure how to tackle quite a few critical design/architecture issues, so you convince your boss to adopt the framework du jour and decide to “let it handle it”. As soon as someone needs something that the framework doesn’t handle, you blame management for making such a myopic technology decision and say that it can’t be done. You keep your job and get a new boss every two years.

This post was written in 2009, which means the Rails hype cycle was at absolute peak. Looking back, the framework-du-jour carousel has spun so many times since then; Backbone → Angular → Ember → React → Vue → Svelte → htmx, that “DFD” is now practically a job title. The irony is that React, which became the dominant “let it handle it” choice for the better part of a decade, is now itself the thing people are fleeing. Addy Osmani has written about the cost of JS framework churn and how each migration has tended to cost far more than the original adoption.

· · ·

Not Invented Here Development (NIHD) — The opposite of Defer to the Framework Development, as soon as you discover something the current framework can’t handle, you abandon it and write all your own routines. Everything now works exactly as you want it, but with all the additional code to maintain, your backlog has just grown from 6 months to 2 years.

Some of the most NIH-afflicted organizations (early Amazon, early Google) turned their internal reinventions into products (AWS, Bigtable/BigQuery) and ended up winning. The rest just quietly accrued two-year backlogs as described. The honest version of NIHD’s calculus is that owning your stack gives you deep understanding but the cost compounds ruthlessly over time (Kellan Elliott-McCrea wrote about this during his time at Etsy).

· · ·

Whoever Screams Loudest Development (WSLD) — Just as the name implies, you work for the customer who screams the loudest. If anyone screams louder, you drop everything and work on their project.

· · ·

F-Bomb Development (FBD) — Whenever everyone is screaming so loud you can’t hear anything, you work on the project of the customer who drops the most F-bombs.

This one is timeless.

· · ·

Start Over Development (SOD) — A critical requirement cannot be supported by the current architecture, so you decide to rewrite it. You spend 3 months designing the new architecture and then 6 months writing the new code. You never finish because you’re out of business. Now you know what “critical” means.

The autopsy for this pattern remains Spolsky’s Netscape post, but the case study that really drove it home for a generation of developers was the Friendster-to-Facebook transition and, more painfully, the Digg v4 rewrite in 2010, which effectively killed the company. The 3-month architecture phase feels like real progress and generates real excitement, and again, it’s the most enjoyable part of software development for a lot of people.

· · ·

Workaround Development (WAD) — The opposite of Start Over Development, you can make the current system do anything. You are so clever with your extra algorithms, functions, and databases. Even with all your great variable naming and comments, six months later, you have no idea how anything works.

Foote and Yoder named this the “Big Ball of Mud” in their 1999 paper of the same name, and their observation that it’s actually the dominant architecture in production systems worldwide remains one of the most quietly devastating things ever written about software. It often produces genuinely working software for longer than any of the cleaner approaches (arguably) the system is alive, users are happy (arguably), and it’s only the next developer (or future you) who pays the price. Ward Cunningham’s original framing of “technical debt” was meant to describe exactly this tradeoff: borrowing against future understanding to ship today.

· · ·

Code Generation Development (CGD) — You’re so tired of writing the same code over and over, that you write a code generator to do it for you. What used to take a week only takes a few hours with the new tool. But you’re no further ahead because 80% of your time is needed to enhance and maintain the code generator.

This one did not age the way the author expected. The code generation problem got absorbed by an industry: first by scaffolding tools, then by platform engineering teams, and eventually by LLMs. The new version of this is that you spend 80% of your time writing and maintaining prompts instead of a generator, which is arguably the same trap with a different texture.

· · ·

Infinite Prototyping Development (IPD) — Your customers and users are unable to describe or document their requirements. So you spend lots of time with them understanding their business and when you’re ready, you throw together a prototype. They love it, but it needs just a few changes. You keep making changes, but it always needs more. It stays a prototype forever. When the app crashes because of security or scaling issues, you’re off the hook because, “It’s only a prototype.”

The Lean Startup movement (Ries, 2011) tried to rehabilitate the prototype by renaming it the MVP and giving it a lifecycle, so the “forever prototype” is a failure of process, not of the artifact itself. It helped somewhat. What it didn’t fix is the social contract problem at IPD’s core because once stakeholders have seen something running, they shift from “requirements document” to “change request,” and you can never get them back. Many people do not know this but React was originally an internal Facebook prototype that just… never stopped (React is still referenced ironically in the 0ver satire).

· · ·

Infinite Analysis Development (IAD) — You never have to do anything because you never have specs. Woo hoo!

The Agile Manifesto was signed in 2001, eight years before this post, specifically because this had become the dominant mode of enterprise software development through the 1990s. And yet here we are in 2009 still writing about it, and here it is in 2026 still happening in every organization large enough to have a dedicated “architecture review board.” If the thing you’d build is going to be wrong, not building it yet has real value. The problem is that the people practicing it rarely know which situation they’re in.

These were already old in 2009 and they still hold up seventeen years later because, IMHO, most of them aren’t software problems but people problems wearing software clothes.

Read it again: every pattern has a destructive opposite. GPD and MQD. DFD and NIHD. SOD and WAD. The narrow, uncomfortable space between each pair is where actual engineering happens, but nobody writes a blog post about it because it doesn’t have a funny acronym (yet?). #Programming

Why English has silent letters

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why English has silent letters

TIL that silent letters in English were the results of men trying to "fix English" across history #linguist

quality of HN comments

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

quality of HN comments

quality of HN comments. I don't get what ed meant there, my best interpretation is that it was a playful moment on the keyboard, which I find joyful and nice.

Kyoshi Island

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Kyoshi Island

"I created Kyoshi Island so my people can be safe from invasions", does not this contradict with her responsibilities? What about other people?

the true mind

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

the true mind

The true mind can weather all the lies and illusions without being lost. The true heart can touch the poison of hatred without being harmed.

Alexandre Charles Guillemot, Art

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alexandre Charles Guillemot, Art

Alexandre Charles Guillemot looks interesting and mysterious, he only had 3 paintings, but they're all so beautiful.

2026/03/19

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2026/03/19

09:59

>https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/6392/47421

Nobel Peace prize tends to go to people who identify with hard left wing in general, and VERY often are Marxist (and even more often take Marxist-friendly, anti-capitalist positions without admitting to being Marxist).

Wow, such a stupid take, I'm surprised that it comes from a top user of the politics SE community, I wonder what else stupid things this user might have posted as answers.

10:20 Me and who

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

He is a longtime friend and collaborator of Paul Graham. Along with cofounding two companies with him, Graham dedicated his book ANSI Common Lisp to Morris and named the programming language that generates the online stores' web pages RTML (Robert T. Morris Language) in his honor. Graham lists Morris as one of his personal heroes, saying that Morris is "never wrong."[21]

bottom-posting

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

bottom-posting

I never thought of a good use to bottom-posting (including all the conversation when replying in emails). Now I can see how useful it is when forwarding emails.

La Vita Nouva

Pic - April 05, 2026

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#10)

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#9)

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#8)

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#7)

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#6)

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#5)

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#4)

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#3)

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#2)

Pic - April 4, 2026 (#1)

Pic - April 03, 2026

al-Jabri

al-Jabri

Reading leaked Claude Code source code

Reading leaked Claude Code source code

The codename canary problem

goodClaude, bughunter and other internal commands

import I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_CODE_OR_FILEPATHS

Multi-Clauding analytics

2,600 lines of preventing rm -rf

YOLO

A complete Vim implementation, from scratch

If ye does not heed

You have a pet

Other things worth mentioning

Repeat Emacs

Repeat Emacs

Doctors in Gaza.

Doctors in Gaza.

Adaptation. (2002)

Adaptation. (2002)

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Magnolia (1999)

Magnolia (1999)

Make macOS 26 consistently bad (unironically)

Make macOS 26 consistently bad (unironically)

Footnotes

arpeggios in circle of fifths

arpeggios in circle of fifths

How camera works

How camera works

Little Known Development Methods (2009)

Little Known Development Methods (2009)

Why English has silent letters

Why English has silent letters

quality of HN comments

quality of HN comments

Kyoshi Island

Kyoshi Island

the true mind

the true mind

Alexandre Charles Guillemot, Art

Alexandre Charles Guillemot, Art

2026/03/19

2026/03/19

09:59

10:20 Me and who

bottom-posting

bottom-posting

`goodClaude`, `bughunter` and other internal commands

`import I_VERIFIED_THIS_IS_NOT_CODE_OR_FILEPATHS`