Safia Abdalla

oh yay @github.com added a "Copy Markdown" option on the menu for issue comments so I don't have to play the edit and Ctrl + C game anymore 😁

Mullet guy at my gym cut his hair The winds of change are blowing and I don’t like where they go

Asked an agent to fix a tricky race condition in tests and now I feel like I've definitely made it on the shitlist for the robot apocalypse

Google needs to explain this icon change. I’m disturbed.

Pro-tip: dig up some PRs where you've gotten some great code review and ask your coding agent of choice to generate a code review skill based on the style of feedback left by the reviewers in those PRs.

Sometimes instead of using AI, I Google something and read the docs page just to feel alive again.

Don't ask Gemini to review your code like a senior engineer who hates your PR and wants to block it unless you're in an emotionally healthy space.

Will people come for me if I confess that I bang my mechanical keyboard against my desk to shake the crumbs out? 🫣

I needed a landing page for a new project and was completely stuck on the UI. I tried v0 a try and the first feature that caught my eye was a little magic-wand button that refines your prompt before generating anything. Such a simple idea, but it instantly brought me joy.

Feel a bit of loss at the decline of GitHub as a *social coding* platform. It seems like people are quick to dismiss that premise in the era of AI-enabled coding but I think there is still value in providing a space for communal ownership over software.

I joked about the "QA engineer for my agents" thing earlier but it's honestly so peaceful to just sit and polish software with the help of agents. You can really fight a lot of slop with intentionality and attention to detail.

Another weekend shift completed being QA engineer for my coding agents 😆

inside me are two wolves

Such an unreal experience watching a agent build and run a Rust app and then test a feature in a VM. I'm excited for people to start using this app soon...IYKYK 😉

Things agents say all the time that I’ve never heard a person say: "Alternatively, I could use sed for surgical replacement.” 😆

This is how I bucket PR reviews: - Request changes: Never use this lol - Comment only: Not ready to merge; blocking feedback - Comment + approve: Ready to merge; feedback is non-blocking; trust dev to do the right thing - Approve: Ready to merge What’s your bucketing?

You can name Git stashes with the `-m` flag. ``` git stash -m "client-db-iteration"` ``` I've been using this to "discard" agent code I don't like so I can retrieve it later. You can also tell the agent to look at previous stashes by name as context in agent sessions.

Just shipped Grove v2! - Swapped TS + Bun for Rust so binaries are nearly 40x smaller - Support initializing new worktrees with custom commands - Harden Windows support and shell integration Try it out: github.com/captainsafia...

Launching something big tomorrow...

The Coinbase commercial lulled everyone in my bar into a false sense of security so we started singing…then we all booed when we realized it was a crypto ad and that’s how I know I picked the right watering hole. 😆

My first little change has landed in @warpdotdev! Warp's got a nice footer that integrates with terminal-based agents to give you quick access to a rich diff viewer, voice input, and more. I added the agent footer support to Copilot! 🤖 😇

I measure my productivity as a dev with the only metric that truly matters: bugs introduced per hour.

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined the team at @warp.dev. I’ve long loved the terminal and I appreciate the power of AI-enabled software development. Warp brings those together in a way I’m excited to learn from and help build with a super product-focused team. 💻️ 🐚 ❤️ 🤖 🚀

After about 6 years of mostly having some sort of fitness tracker attached to me, I traded in both of my Apple Watches today. I'm experimenting with different ways of tracking progress and measuring myself this year...we'll see how it goes 😅

The more software you write the more intuition you develop for the kinds of things that go around it. Letting AI speedrun through the drudgery lets you develop that big picture intuition sooo much faster.

using one of my side projects in another side project

OMG AND IT STILL RUNS SEQUOIA I AM SHAKING

Unboxing a new Macbook is such a heavenly experience.

What happened after this? I made progress updating things but had an epiphany along the way: a lot of nteract’s APIs existed because the JS ecosystem lacked the right primitives. Building this in something like Rust would likely yield clearer abstractions so I’m excited about github.com/runtimed.

I told Codex how to patch packages via the `pnpm patch` command and I can literally feel it drunk with power.

I think I just had my "Codex moment." I’m using it to do a package upgrade across the nteract monorepo, a ~5-year catch-up with the JS ecosystem. It does a better job managing the context window and seems to "understand" the bigger goal of a large upgrade better than Claude or Copilot.

Ugh, the bad thing about the point I'm at right now is that I find it really hard to use languages that don't have a built-in concept of pattern matching. Once you discover that capability, it's just impossible to go back.

bored...why not?

Maybe I've got rose-colored glasses but I love open source too much to believe it will not survive this AI wave. There's just something too profound about putting an idea out there and having people instantly build on top of it. I refuse to believe that will lose value or go away.

Just a girl, standing in front of an LLM, asking it to please return JSON and nothing fucking else else. 😭

I'm raw-coding (no AI) my next side project and this feels like the mental equivalent of a heavy set of squats. But still good for you!

Every time I touch an nteract package it's like walking through a JS ecosystem time capsule. Case in point: remember Enzyme for testing React components? lol

@blowdart.me thank you for the gift. Angelic Pilchuck sleeping photo as a symbol of my gratitude.

After 7 years, my time at Microsoft has come to a close. I grew from a green dev into a bonafide engineer, shipped work I’m proud of, and learned what it takes to build software that lasts from amazing people. Taking a short breather then on to the next adventure! 🚀

I am using git worktree for years, and used only 3 till now 🤔 2 for development, and 1 for the reviews. I liked the idea of @captainsafia.com to use worktree in place of branches. So, I had a look into her grove tool, very nice 🤩 and started to port it to .NET 10 AOT going from 108 MB to 5.73 MB 😍

It's amazing how fast you can act on your little creative impulses now. Thought of this while making dinner and got it done with some prompts while eating. It's a changelog based on my commits for the week that updates on a cron. cl.safia.dev p.s. hover over the weeks for a little easter egg

I’m kinda bummed the aurora viewing window didn’t end up materializing tonight Here’s a photo I took from my backyard the last time it was out

I know it’s bad for the environment and we’ll probably pay for it with wildfires in the summer but I’ve been loving these dry and sunny winter days in the PNW for running.

The tech industry has a credentialism problem and you can see this most clearly in how people react when certain key figures, like Linus, adopt AI tools. Try things out yourself and don’t rely on epistemic outsourcing.

Cooked up a homepage for Hone on one of the domains I bought. No matter how hard I prompt, LLM-generated UIs always drift toward the mean. This isn’t quite the visual style I want but I need to think it through and articulate it better. I like what I did with the footer tho 😇 hone.safia.dev

Tired of slow .NET setup in GitHub Actions? I built a fast, performant alternative to actions/setup-dotnet with parallel downloads, caching & smart version resolving. github.com/fast-actions... We‘re using this Action @scalar.com and reduced the execution time from 24s to 2s!

It's so nice to see the Hone LSP come to life in Vim! Still some polishing to do and I need to figure out how to get semantic highlighting working but I got giddy seeing the completion dropdowns appear 🥳

Started prototyping a VS Code test explorer for Hone. Got far enough to realize I probably didn't need to focus on a good IDE experience. Pro: discovered the Common Test Report Format. Standardized, machine-readable test output feels like good thing these days.