Yannick

📢 Our next event is up! On Wednesday 11 November, James Turner will share how he’s building and running software with AI tools. A useful temperature check one year into the rise of agentic models. 📅 Details & registration 👇 www.meetup.com/php-s... #php

Nocellara olives are the best

My winter coat is officially out of the cupboard

Seeing software companies use yesterday's events to nudge worried businesses away from PHP... as if other languages don't have lurking security flaws. If anything, the response has reassured me. I feel more confident than ever building software with PHP for my clients.

AI hasn't changed the fact that I can still spend a couple of days on a single PR. No matter how good the latest models are, they still suffer from tunnel vision and it's still on us to know when to take a step back and refactor

Mood

I don’t know if it’s just my baseline that’s adjusted, but Open 5.5 felt much faster at launch and I now find it pretty slow again. Just me?

Look I was excited to give Dungeon Crawler Carl a go but that Amazon Kindle exclusivity kinda poured cold water on that

"Please send me your CV." I thought I was past that tbh 🙄

European attitudes toward digital privacy and technology regulation are often dismissed in the US as technophobia. But there are distinct, historically grounded reasons why Europe has moved further and faster to regulate Big Tech, writes Enrique Dans, a professor at IE Business School, Madrid.

Is anyone here gainfully employed as a software engineer / developer / programmer / insert equivalent term, who only learned to code after having generated code with LLMs? Or do you know anyone who is?

I may or may not have watched an entire documentary about Céline Dion tonight. And enjoyed it.

Finally submitted my talks for Confoo. The character limit is brutal though 😭

Just watched Obsession. I peed myself a little

The State of Laravel survey is still open!

"You're not fucking around, are you?" "Not since Kuwait." This kind of line is why I'm watching The Bear.

Hokum was fun. Folk horror that does the job (there's always a bloody basement!)

claude --model claude-opus-4-8

📢 Our next event is up! On Wednesday 9 September, Rob Allen and Tamas Erdelyi will join us for two talks about API security and what goes into building a side project. 📅 Details and registration 👇 www.meetup.com/php-s... #php

Quick Claude tip: if you're reorganising your local folders, don't forget to tell Claude about it, e.g.: "This is the project's new API folder." Claude will migrate existing memories to the new folder.

I don't know for how much longer we're going to put up with Anthropic being so unreliable. I'm not sure why I'm paying so much to see my work being interrupted twice a day.

Opus 5 absolutely sucks at comments

This is a goldmine of product engineering resources, helping me define the role better

Disclosure Day is such a disappointment

I'm at a stage where my main engineering issue is the duration of my agent loops. Any task goes through the same loop, but it's disproportionately heavy for many of them. I need to tailor the loop to the task somehow

Just watched Inside the Manosphere after finishing Adolescence yesterday, while watching my one-year-old son sleeping on the baby monitor. How hard can it be to keep him off the internet till he’s 20?

Context engineering in practice: my new post covering how a third-party integration didn't go as planned, highlighting the developer's crucial role

Context engineering in practice: my new post covering how a third-party integration didn't go as planned, highlighting the developer's crucial role

Agentic work means I work on two things in parallel most of the time now. I can handle 3, but opportunities to do so are fairly rare. I occasionally tried to do more, but looks like 3 is my limit – beyond that, that’s too much context-switching for my brain

😬 bambamramfan.github....

Is one supposed to finish these in one go?

I understand some of the feedback around Opus 5 now. It definitely is more conservative, in an annoying way. Random directives it picks from elsewhere now seem to have as much weight as my own instructions.

I’m trying to use Sonnet as my daily driver to save on token consumption, but it’s just too dumb. I end up wasting tokens (and my time) instead

I finally have some time to dedicate to PixelWatcher (I’m busy with a new contract, which is good!). I’m aiming for a public launch in the next few weeks (meaning there’s still time to join the private beta 👀)

This is fine 📎

Always interesting to see how these companies use AI. I'm still not completely sure how to approach the review/verification side of things, but I totally agree on how it allows companies to scale more slowly

I thought switching back to VSCode from Cursor would also mean fewer updates... I was wrong 🙄

I really wanted to like The Man in the High Castle, but I’m halfway through season 2, and I’m bored to death

If you're looking for a task for Claude to do semi-autonomously (and that you can monitor from your phone, for instance), try `/doctor`. It does a lot more than it used to, and will probably flag and offer to fix things currently flying under your radar

Claude Code tip: To maximise the number of 5-hour windows I get per day, I set up a dummy routine that runs at 5:30 am. It starts my first session before I wake up, so when I begin work I have a fresh session with a couple of hours left, and can fit three sessions into the day.

caffeinate -d