On the UI of Coding Assistants And Agents
An AI assistant verses an AI agent may have less to do with the UI, and more with how it’s used.
I’ve been misspelling “cancelled” a lot recently, in that I’ve been spelling it correctly yet the linter’s been saying, “no. Use the US spelling of ‘canceled’!” 😏
If there’s one thing I’m learning from Ben Thompson, it’s that everything’s a trade-off and nothing in life is perfect. And that’s no less true for something like adopting a branching process. Should you merge your changes straight to main; or should you keep main stable for production releases, and have a separate development branch? Not the question to ask: either approach sucks (trust me, I’ve worked with both). The answer is to find an approach that sucks the least for you and the way you work.
My mind wandered this morning to a job I previously had that had an office in a building that had a pair of breeding peregrine falcons. They were provided with a nesting box and an ornithologist set up a webcam. The feed is available on the internet and in the office we tacked it on to a TV set up to cycled through things like our Jira board and support queue. Every few minutes or so, the camera feed of the nesting falcons came on and I always enjoyed looking up to see when while I was working.
Since then I haven’t really been following them closely. They still nest there and usually the feed comes online around October. I’ll need to make a conscious effort to bring the feed up when spring rolls around.
Glad I’m not the only one that’s frustrated with Google Maps showing route numbers instead of street names. May be a false memory but I seem to remember this being better in the past. Don’t know why they decided to change it.
I see that JetBrains hasn’t fix that GoLand backspace bug yet, where the backspace key stops working for some random reason. That’s quite a strange one.
“How fast does Stripe post web-hook events?”, you ask. Well at the moment I’m facing a small race condition where a thread makes a call to Stripe, and another thread receives the event before the first one has finished its routine. So yeah, pretty fast.
Release version 1.2.0 of Postlist which contains the following changes:
- New
limitattribute which can be used the set the maximum number of posts shown in the list. - A new mode which display the full contents of a post, rather than just the title or the first line. This can be enabled by setting the new
displayattribute tocontent.
Just a reminder that the attributes can be mixed and matched, so you can use both these new attributes together, along with all the existing ones:
{{< postlist limit="3" categories="Example" order="date" display="content" >}}
See updated documentation for details, including how the markup of full post content can be configure if desired (this works in a similar way to microhooks in Tiny Theme, in which you create customer templates with specific names).
🛠️ PocketCal
Nice looking web-app for sharing event dates by Cassidy Williams. Nothing stored server-side: all the event details are encoded in the URL. One of those sites that’s worth keeping in your back pocket for when you need it.
Via: Robb Knight
Great time of year to pick a birthday. Organising an event today and everyone’s sick, including myself. Just received one cancellation because someone’s got the flu. Argh! Ah well. It is what it is.
🔗 Simon Willison: Identify, solve, verify
No matter how good these [coding LLMs] get, they will still need someone to find problems for them to solve, define those problems and confirm that they are solved. […] It’s also about 80% of what I do as a software developer already.
Hey, I’m a software developer too. And I acknowledge that my job is more than just typing things into an IDE. In fact, it’s probably closer to what Simon Willison does, where I’m identifying problems, and writing Jira tickets for others to fix rather than do it myself. And it might be that with the introduction of coding LLMs, software development will simply be more of this going forward. It certainly the direction things look to be going.
But I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t be disappointed to see all these coding tasks go away, and all my job description reduced to finding problems and verifying fixes. Like some sort of… manager 😖. I got into software development because I like to code. And part of this is finding problems, but I only get the dopamine hit after fixing them. I get nothing if I simply tell someone (or something) else to fix it.
And okay, we’re talking about a job here. And I’ve reached the age where I recognise one doesn’t always achieve a fulfilling life from their careers alone. So might be that this is something that I just need to recognise that sometimes jobs suck and identifying problems is all I’ll ever do in the near future.
But I would tell employers thinking of outsourcing all coding tasks to LLMs to consider this: if I’m faced with two employment opportunities, and one has 0% coding tasks, and the other has >0% coding tasks, I’d take the latter any day of the week.
Lightbulb moments.
It may seem like that spending all evening watching TGV cab rides on YouTube would not yield any lessons1, and usually you would be correct. But after watching a cab-ride yesterday, I did learn a few things about overhead electrical systems that I found quite interesting.
I also learnt about mid-point anchors. I’ve seen these around our system with relatively newer infrastructure, I was curious as to why they needed to exist, and why they aren’t present in the older sections. Turns out they’re required when both the catenary and overhead lines are attached with tensioning equipment. These are usually weights, and since neither wire are attached to anything fix, they can moving freely along the track. Hence the need for these anchors to prevent that from happening. I also realised that in the older infrastructure, the catenary are connected to the gantries, which remove the need for such things.
Anyway, forgive the rambling and nerdy post. I’ve have a fascination in these electrical systems and I always find such factoids interesting. Probably helps that finding this out offsets the negative feelings I got from spending all evening watching YouTube.
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I’m still recovering from a cold, or at least thats the excuse I’m going with. ↩︎
🔗 LMNT: I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet
It’s one thing for QuickTime UI to “get out of the way.” Please, do. I’m watching a video. I don’t need a big honkin’ pause button in the middle of the window, you know? But wait a minute, why is there a big honkin’ pause button in the middle of the window anyway? That’s not how it used to be.
I don’t always agree with Louie Mantia but he’s absolutely right here. When did hiding UI or moving it out of various bars become synonymous of “getting out of the way of content”? Slapping UI over the content is not getting out of the way. In fact it’s the exact opposite.
I’m now fully on the train of code first, manual testing next, then unit tests last. It’s while the code is running in a larger system where you “feel” how best it should behave, and whether that behaviour needs to change in any way. You then use the unit tests at the end to lock that behaviour in.
Pretty impressive to see what’s possible with CSS nowadays. Viewing the page source is quite illuminating.
🔗 Search Engine Land: What 1,000 food blog audits has taught me about SEO
I’m wary about posts on SEO but I found this one discussing the techniques attempted by recipe bloggers quite interesting. In short: cargo cult thinking around SEO myths is resulting in many bad food sites.
Via: Pixel Envy
Released version 1.1.0 of Postlist. Featuring more sorting options, such as sorting by date or sorting in descending order:
<!-- Oldest to newest -->
{{< postlist order="date" >}}
<!-- From Z to A -->
{{< postlist order="alpha desc" >}}
See docs for details.
Started seeing Christmas in July signs go up. Wonder if that’s a thing in countries north of the equator. Something celebrated by Aussie expats who consider Christmas a summer holiday.
Suffering from a cold, I probably shouldn’t have gone in to work today. I’m sort of glad I did though as I had a pretty productive day. Got a release out to prod that’s been in the works for a few months that I’m really happy to see the back of.