Weeknotes 245

You’ll be glad to know I’ve had neither the time nor headspace to worry about AI this week.

This week has been another shit one. After all hell broke lose in the Middle East last Saturday, A, who was meant to get home from her holiday on Wednesday, became stranded instead. This was very stressful as flights became few and expensive due to the closed air space in the region.

The worst part is the not knowing.

Oh, and don’t rely rely on anyone you’ve paid to help or even give the slightest shit either. ATOL protection will be getting tested when she eventually gets back.

Happy Birthday to me 🥳

I installed Dockhand this week to give me a better overview of my Docker containers. It’s really nice so far. Easy to setup and get going. It can notify you of various events like containers being started, stopped, etc, and can also check for updates – I set these up via ntfy.

There are several other contenders in this space including Portainer, Arcane, and Komodo, so I might not be settled on this one forever.

Three ways to solve problems

…reaching the desired state (perfect product) is neither possible nor sensible

The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

But the fundamental challenge remains unchanged: translating human intent into correct, efficient, maintainable, secure software is hard. Not because the tools are inadequate, but because the problem is inherently complex.

Perhaps…

History suggests that reports of programming’s death have been greatly exaggerated, repeatedly, for over sixty years. There is no reason to believe this time is fundamentally different. There is every reason to believe that those who invest in deep understanding will continue to be valuable, regardless of what tools emerge.

…some hope?

Elixir Phoenix Optimisations iPhone Safari – gotta be careful with that CSS!

Lose Myself by Greg Knauss

Is the code any good? I don’t know. Who cares? Nobody looks at it anyway. AI produces a result, and results are what matter, and if you’re waiting for quality to factor significantly into that equation, I’ve got some bad news about the last 40 years of professional software development for you.

Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

And I have discipline and I know how to ship. And in my experience, that’s what has always mattered.

Two qualities I do not have. That’s a shame for me.

PostgreSQL 18 RETURNING Enhancements: A Game Changer for Modern Applications

Today I am learning about the MERGE statement.

Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?

As discussed in this issue from 2014 (where Dan first openly contemplated a license change) Mark Pilgrim’s original code was a manual port from C to Python of Mozilla’s MPL-licensed character detection library.

This is fascinating. Python library chardet was rewritten using Claude. Original author objects, but the original library, before rewrite, was itself a port from C to Python.

Uplock – If I move to Apple Passwords from 1Password I will need somewhere to put all those non-password secrets that I use 1Password for. This might be that place.

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

I had to learn to let go. Not of quality - I still care about quality. But of the expectation that AI would produce quality. I now treat every AI output as a rough draft. A starting point. Raw material. I mentally label it “draft” the moment it appears, and that framing change alone reduced my frustration by half.

This post is chock-full of plugs for the author’s various products but a lot of it really resonated with me. I have felt so tired when using AI. At first I thought it was not having coded much recently. Getting back into programming after some time off often makes me really tired as I re-engage my brain in a different way.

But this time I think AI is the main cause. Reading the reams of text it produces, which is something I struggle with generally, and the guilt from skipping over it all. The code reviews. The understanding hundreds of lines of text from nothing.

The fight for our attention

I’ve beaten this drum many times, but I’m going to keep at it. Multitasking is a myth. You cannot split your attention. It is neurologically impossible.

John Siracusa on the new MacBook Neo:

The A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo is 19% faster than the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro in single-core performance (Geekbench 6). The MacBook Neo starts at $599. The Mac Pro, which is still for sale, starts at $6,99.

Crazy that this is the case. The MacBook Neo should be the average user’s computer, no doubt.

TIL about FerretDB

A truly Open Source MongoDB alternative, built on Postgres

It there anything Postgres can’t do?!

At least the daffodils are starting to bloom.