I love how uv allows me to not think of all the options anymore.
virtualenv, venv, pyenv, pipenv... I think at one point the recommended option changed because it was integrated into Python, but I can't even remember which is which anymore.
Such a pleasure to finally have just one, for maybe... ~99% of my needs.
The fun / creative part for me is not googling “how to slurp the contents of a file into a string” or “the exact syntax for marking some functions as unit tests” or “the correct order of symbols to specify generic type param”
It’s not “the correct html / css syntax for this basic gui I want to make”
It’s not “how to achieve the thing I’ve done 10 thousand times in other languages/frameworks, but for this language/framework”
It’s figuring the core logic out, building the thing while skipping the boring stuff, playing with abstractions that scratch my itch.
From this pov, AI is the best thing that has happened to my weekend coding. I code recreationally way more than before. Before AI, I would try a new language or framework, and I’d give up halfway because re-figuring out basic stuff for the umpteenth time is boring, it’s not fun at all. Now AI lets me skip those boring parts.
Learning Elixir and fixing a bug in an open source project went from "risk of a long slog over the course of a month with no reward" to "pepper an LLM with questions (debugging errors, understanding syntax, translating code snippets to English descriptions of behavior), write 20 lines of code by hand, write a few test cases, and submit the PR fix".
Strong agree. I've been making more progress on my passion project in the last few weeks than I have in a year, because it helped me break out of analysis paralysis.
I'm really, really, loving the agentic flow, where it digs itself out of syntax errors and the like.
Current tools: Visual Studio Code/GitHub ChatGPT5(Preview)
An example I’ve done with a small language model is fine tuning a small model for evaluating semi structured user input for whether it’s likely sanctions evasion. The heuristic code to do this due to the fact is got a natural language component is very complex and has a relatively poor precision and recall. A fine tuned model pretty reliably classified the inputs and was pretty resilient to adversarial attacks while heuristics - partially due to their full determinism - were very brittle over time.
These sorts of “heuristics are surprising incapable while the semantic flexibility of language models are powerful” are surprisingly large. Even flexible validation mechanisms that take human entered semi fixed form inputs and reformat them to the expected input in a really reliable way and is much less frustrating to end users. Essentially any situation where abductive logic or natural language comes into the picture a small model does really well.
Both of those things - abductive logic and natural language - were largely unavailable as tools until recently. This pretty nearly rounds out the complete toolkit for making really robust and powerful (and usable) systems. You sacrifice a perceived determinism by admitting abductive logic and non determinism, but in my experience this warm blanket of the mathematically inclined wasn’t particularly robust in reality and systems often deterministically failed in complex and difficult if not impossible ways to avoid that a little bit of abductive reasoning could make it remarkably simpler and more robust.
I've been taking these rides 5-6 days a week, everywhere, and also in other countries outside the US. What I've come to realize is this: what matters to me the most is the consistency of the lowest bar of the experience.
I get that sometimes with human drivers, when I'm lucky, I get someone who goes above and beyond, someone who's fantastic to talk to along the way, and so on.
But if I can trade all that with a guarantee that there's a consistent, predictable floor to my worst experience, I'll take it in a heartbeat.
At the end of it, I take a ride to get from point A to point B. I'd rather have a machine does it for me very efficiently, without all the messy human element, with the ups and the downs, because it's the downs that ruin my day.
100%. I've discovered the floor: Small cars that probably aren't safe, trashed interior, and drivers who smell of literally every vice while talking on the phone AND playing whatever music all together. "Premium" is simply not that experience.
Maybe this is a case where more training data isn’t better. There is probably a lot of bad/old C++ out there in addition to new/modern C++, compared to Rust which is relatively all modern.
Yes, I think that's it. There is a lot of horrible C++ code out there, especially on StackOverflow where "this compiled for me" sometimes ends up being the accepted answer. There are also a lot of ways to use C++ poorly/wrong without even knowing it.
As a teenager, I was fortunate that my Dad bought me a copy of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey.
Quote:
Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able.” They don’t blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they can choose their behavior.
While it may be common sense/doh-so-obvious today, this was such a mind-blowing reframe for the teenage me back then, and it shaped me immeasurably as a person for the better, for the 30+ years that follow.
The key point i remember from this book is the emphasis on P (Production) and PC (Production Capability). I took this to heart and have always focused on my PC (acquiring new knowledge/skills etc. in various domains) while i am delivering on my current P (i.e. doing what the job requires). Too many people get caught up with the immediate needs of the job at hand and never look beyond it. PC requires being proactive and thus needs discipline and persistence.
Exactly... add to that the requirement that I want to have the peace of mind of being able to accidentally bang the watch against the metal poles of the subway, etc., without damaging it in some ways, and I always end up with a G-Shock.
virtualenv, venv, pyenv, pipenv... I think at one point the recommended option changed because it was integrated into Python, but I can't even remember which is which anymore.
Such a pleasure to finally have just one, for maybe... ~99% of my needs.