Sam 💛

GitHub's verified (signed) commit badges aren't aligned, cannot unsee.

My thoughts on the current state of AI driven software development, why I'm no longer concerned about a runaway intelligence explosion, and what I think is a far worse outcome we could be walking into maevyn.codes/decoherence

Pumpkin spice lattes have returned to my local woodland cafe. And with that everything feels right with the world.

It can be interesting to read how the AI labs are doing agentic development. It’s even more interesting when they document the same limitations the rest of us experience, in which case I question how it’s viable for them. If you don’t have an unlimited budget and a golden goose, is it still viable?

Finally catching up on the Mercurial talk I missed at Git Merge. The data model seems very elegant and intuitive. Topics sound a little like how I have envisioned reviewing and merging (sub)sets of changes, a bit closer to Gerrit.

Finally Frankensteined my AC into being smart-ish with an IR blaster, just in time for winter.

Linear’s mobile app emulates Liquid Glass in the bottom navigation rather than using the real thing. It’s icky.

iOS 27 and friends are about to drop. I’ve been running the betas since the early developer releases. This is the smoothest and most reliable the operating systems have felt since I adopted the ecosystem five years ago. I wish every release would balance features and polish like this.

Astra has generated some truly trash code for me this week. It does feel as though they’re optimising for replacing SWEs in order to facilitate cheap technically-functional junk, rather than enhancing SWEs to produce better output faster. Better lock-in that way too.

Not sure I can remember Sol/previous being as gracious as Astra here after multiple rounds of disagreement. (Yes I know I'm anthropomorphising too much.)

It's real nice when debugging libraries to have your agent spin up an ephemeral single-file HTML repro that even renders in-app.

I don’t really live in the terminal any more, but anyone currently feeling disillusioned with Neovim should try Helix. Break free from the Vi family!

Had to debug a Linux-specific E2E failure today. It was less faff to get things running with Apple's container CLI (github.com/apple/contai...). Only downside versus Colima is no included Docker CLI interop.

It took me nearly a decade but I’ve finally learned how to forage and start a fire in DayZ. I am however now fighting off illness from eating baked wolf steaks. The game is oddly serene.

The Codex Remote -> push to iPhone over WiFi setup I have going is very effective for simple apps. I can do it all from my phone. I don’t know why we have Image Playground and not something to generate apps instead, in the spirit of Glaze. I suppose generating WebExtensions is the first step.

Has anyone ever gone through something architectural with Codex without it saying "seam"?

Codex have got me hooked off the back of these resets.

How did I only learn today that the mini floating keyboard in iPadOS supports swipe typing, like on iOS 😍

This works and is preferable to unvetted, often paid alternatives in the App Store or equivalent.

After a year of placing my iPhone Air face down unprotected, it has no visible scratches. Dropped it plenty of times too. Ceramic Shield 2 is more than marketing fluff!

Because of this my agent dictation keeps saying "Fred" 😭 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fron...

I've switched from Handy to native macOS dictation. I don't know if it's improved in macOS 27 or I just didn't give it a fair shake before, but if all you need it for is transcribing to an agent then it's absolutely sufficient; LLMs are extremely good at parsing meaning from typos.

I've long struggled to get Zed, Codex, etc to hook into my shell, be that for Nix (direnv) or Mise. Mise shims plugged into your system shell are the solution: github.com/samhh/dotfil.... It works with repo-local configs as well!

I've dropped Codex 5.6 Sol down to medium from xhigh and am having a much better time. LLMs are still pretty stupid so the speed is more valuable >95% of the time. I haven't tried Fable yet, mind.

I can't believe how many dev hours I've lost to GitHub Actions. There are no sunlit uplands.

Reading/scanning code is more important than ever. Do any editors display dynamic metadata above signatures? e.g. a recursion label, approx big O, purity, etc without having to read the function body. Maybe in the future local LLMs will be fast enough for this.

I'm up to >1B tokens per month with Codex. Though that's using Sol xhigh for everything in a vain attempt to rein in its stupidity. I do wish the feedback loop was faster.

I'm looking for a new role as a lead frontend/TypeScript engineer. 👋 13 years of experience and I formerly led the web team at Unsplash. My CV: drive.google.com/file/d/1Hp7w... If you know of any roles, please reach out. I'd really appreciate if you could share. Thank you!

I quite like my Eight Sleep so far but I can’t get over such an expensive device shipping without WPA3 support in 2026. I’m doomed to forever have two SSIDs.

From a recent Fly blog post, advocating AI everything: “I want a world where my friends and family can make computers do exactly what they want, without waiting for me to build everything for them.” A cute sentiment that falls apart on closer inspection. Sometimes this industry is so unserious.

Using agents to crank out features of comparable quality in a fraction of the time feels empowering. Likewise being able to dig into a new codebase and ask human questions and usually get good answers. As long as you pick up on when to push back against the plausibly wrong output!

Noticing in Zed with agents I frequently don't want "queue and send", but rather "queue for later". It can take many messages to resolve something which blocks sending the message for the next thing I want that I've already written. At the moment my workaround is the clipboard.

Coding agents are great, but they seem more impactful than they are because they've replaced the majority of typing which occurs via a) more or less copy/pasting documentation and b) following compiler errors. When you are in more advanced weeds their value falls off a cliff.

Me on a very hot Friday afternoon and a LLM is a recipe for disaster. Nobody can be trusted.

Finally watched Project Hail Mary. 10/10, and a happy ending that felt earned. 👎