Carter Bryden 🇨🇦

Some guy named Al is sure prolific in the tech community these days

Listening to @ianlandsman.com essentially re-enact Moneyball with @calebporzio.bsky.social on the Notes on Work podcast. Ian:

Wound up reading some of @david.bernheisel.com ‘s series about safe #elixirlang ecto migrations again tonight after stumbling across an old note I made about it. Still one of the best. fly.io/phoenix-file...

I have a theory that a lot of the problems we see with agents are the same problems we’ve always had working with and managing actual devs, too. When we compare agents with people, we tend to imagine some ideal dev in comparison. But even the best devs I’ve known also occasionally do things like:

I’d never expect a freshly hired dev to push a perfect PR with a single prompt and nothing else. I’d expect bad results, or something in the wrong direction, if there wasn’t more involvement (pairing/cowriting/reviewing). I wouldn’t expect that just writing more context would reliably fix it either.

I have a theory that a lot of the problems we see with agents are the same problems we’ve always had working with and managing actual devs, too. When we compare agents with people, we tend to imagine some ideal dev in comparison. But even the best devs I’ve known also occasionally do things like:

Picked up a Mac Studio recently because my daily driver Linux desktop hardware was showing its age at about 10 years old (some upgrades along the way). Most impressive to me is that it seems to generate no heat or noise, EVER, despite maxing out every core pretty often with elixir concurrency work.

Local LLMs, a zillion concurrent processes with elixir, doesn’t seem to matter what it is. It’s just cool as a cucumber at all times. Coming from non M chip hardware, that’s absolutely nuts to me. My old rig would literally be on fire if I did half of this.

Added upstream load balancing to approximated.app! Now you can: - Set multiple upstreams per custom domain - Set policy (least conns, round robin, etc) - Optional sticky connections - Upstream health checks and rerouting - Configurable over API or dashboard And it'll just... work!

This is extra handy if you want to have your app running on multiple hosting/infra providers and load balance between them for redundancy, costs, etc. Or if you just don't want to manage a global load balancer on your own infrastructure (or your provider makes it hard to do).

We should 100% steal this idea for #elixirlang Phoenix. Such a simple but obvious in hindsight idea. Automating turning controllers/routes into importable frontend packages would eliminate a lot of boiler plate for frontend heavier teams.

So far I've found pair programming with AI to be a bit like pairing with a junior dev who has an insane breadth of knowledge, not much common sense, and doesn't ask the right questions. Using claude 3.7 with reasoning mode + a 200k context window, it's an intermediate dev who asks half of them.

People should totally mess around with it for fun projects. But more than that and it's a bit like deciding you don't need an architect or engineer to sign off on a building. It might be standing. It might even look good. But you have no idea if it's safe or what's going wrong underneath.

So far I've found pair programming with AI to be a bit like pairing with a junior dev who has an insane breadth of knowledge, not much common sense, and doesn't ask the right questions. Using claude 3.7 with reasoning mode + a 200k context window, it's an intermediate dev who asks half of them.

Which is to say that it's a massive boost to productivity for me personally. It's more helpful than time-wasting ~100% of the time now, which I wasn't expecting this soon. I think the larger context window is at least as much a part of it as the model itself.

#elixirlang devs, what are your personal guidelines in liveview for when you make a function component vs a live component? Function component: no state, send events to the parent for handling Live component: maintains it's own separate state, event handlers, etc.

@syntax.fm @wesbos.com @aaronfrancis.com @tolin.ski Listening to your podcast and you guys talking about reflections and glare on your glasses. Try putting some polarized lenses or film in front of your cameras, it completely eliminates screen light. Ex) a.co/d/43evQwM

@syntax.fm @wesbos.com @aaronfrancis.com @tolin.ski Listening to your podcast and you guys talking about reflections and glare on your glasses. Try putting some polarized lenses or film in front of your cameras, it completely eliminates screen light. Ex) a.co/d/43evQwM