Daniel Jalkut

I think there should be a special award for getting contiguous grey lines in Wordle.

Wordle 1,719 4/6*

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In my opinion all the reliability doubts are quelled by human review. I throw tons of problems at AI and only accept the good responses. Sometimes it’s a total idiot and sometimes it saves me hours.

You might be right, but the rough gist of it is that “computers do it worse than humans at their best.” That’s the corollary that I think holds across the comparisons.

For the masses, for sure. But knowing you, and your history, I’m going to bet that knowing something about assembly helped you to be more effective in your work, long after compilers were ubiquitous.

Almost 20 years ago (!) I opined: “C is the New Assembly”, suggesting that we had moved beyond the need to optimize things by writing assembly code. If I wrote the same article today, it might be “Is Hand-written Code the New Assembly?” redsweater.com/blog/278/…

During any tech transition, the people who retain old-school knowledge while the new-school is developing are particularly valuable. Nobody needs to know punch cards anymore, but I’m sure that while punch cards were being phased out, extensive knowledge about them was incredibly useful.

Parallels to the past: C Programmers who benefitted from knowing Assembly. Java programmers who benefited from knowing manual memory management. UIKit programmers who benefited from knowing AppKit. SwiftUI programmers who … well, they kind of got a raw deal.

We’re at a turning point, where everybody 20 years old or so, and older, will have a fundamental advantage against every younger programmer when it comes to “coding with AI”. Younger programmers will have no natural incentives to learn non-vibe coding techniques. Things are gonna get weird.

Screenshot of a conversation with an AI assistant. The user asks: “Explain to me how the ‘rebuilding intermediate property list dictionaries’ was happening before.”&10;&10;The assistant explains that in the old implementation, the method arrayOfPostsFromPath: in MEWeblog+Persistence.m (line 75) processed each post file by first enumerating filenames in a folder, then constructing a string path to the post or its inner Info.plist-style content file. It then called dictionaryWithContentsOfFile: to deserialize the plist into a new in-memory NSDictionary, and passed that dictionary to [[MEWeblogEntry alloc] initWithPersistenceDictionary:].&10;&10;This meant each post load involved an extra full-object materialization step: disk plist to temporary NSDictionary to MEWeblogEntry. The “intermediate property list dictionary” refers to that temporary NSDictionary object (thisPostDict) created in the old code.&10;&10;The assistant explains that the newer implementation skips this extra step and instead calls [[MEWeblogEntry alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:postItemURL]. This initializer, defined in MEWeblogEntry.m (line 450), resolves bundle URLs correctly and allows the base loader to read directly from the URL. As a result, the loading flow is simpler and avoids constructing a separate temporary dictionary for each post.&10;&10;The explanation concludes by noting why this change matters for issue #7117: on blogs with many cached posts, repeatedly creating dictionaries adds significant allocation and parsing overhead. The old code also lost the original post URL context because it built entries from raw dictionaries rather than using URL-backed initialization.

Most of the downsides of inviting AI into your software development workflow can be mitigated by insisting on understanding everything you let it do.

Of all musical instruments, the most important is the ear.

Just coerced my family into watching the first episode of “The Wonder Years,” and I was pleasantly surprised how well it holds up. I’ll be curious to see how it progresses, but after episode 1, it’s even better than I remembered it.

I love that all of AI’s prompting/agents/skills/etc. infrastructure is 100% text based. It makes it so easy to monitor and update exactly what is being fed to the LLM. It would, of course, have been impossible to have such human-auditable configurations before software could “interpret” settings.

The only reason to lay off 40% of your staff because of AI is if 40% of your staff can’t use it. Smart companies will keep their staff and rocket past the competitors who fired everybody who might have mastered it.

If I talk to an AI critic for one minute, I can usually tell why they turn their nose up at it. They have no idea what it can do.

My $1M book idea is “How to Push Back on AI.” It’s a delicate art.

Selfie of a 50-year-old caucasian man with short grey hair and glasses, wearing a brown, blue and white plaid “western” shirt.

I used to buy almost all of my clothes second-hand. Recently I landed in a thrift store where I found this delightful western plaid, which called to me. In this age of thrift/vintage inflation, it’s not uncommon for a shirt like this to cost $60, but I picked it up for $15.

Music is a language just like any spoken one. It’s thrilling to learn a few basic phrases, and then there’s a long slog. Finally you become fluent, and self-expression is unlimited.

Inspired by a post about “starting over” with Claude after leaving ChatGPT: An important part of dealing with any AI is teaching it how to accept the guidance you’ve developed for every AI. Be cross-platform with your AI from the start.

Do you know how painful it is for a self-professed punk to admit that “Ripple”, by the Grateful Dead of all fucking bands, is the best song ever written? www.youtube.com/watch

AI has the intelligence of a 5000-year-old and the wisdom of a 5-year-old.

If my product were so essential to the government that the President threatened me in public with consequences of withholding it, I would think … that’s a pretty good day of PR. #Claude

Programmers aren’t going anywhere. But to be frank, “Able to leverage AI assistance for massive productivity gains” should be at the top of your resume.

Remember before the robots took over, it was popular to say “everybody should learn to code”?

Now? Everybody should learn to sew by hand. Very satisfying.

Thanks!

Screenshot of a cheat sheet page. AI summary: A single-page reference card for the 20 Xcode MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools, organized in a three-column grid on a US Letter page. A dark charcoal header band reads "Xcode MCP Tools — Reference" with a note that all tools require a tabIdentifier parameter. Below, a color-coded legend maps six categories: Build & Run (orange, 6 tools: BuildProject, &10; GetBuildLog, XcodeListNavigatorIssues, XcodeRefreshCodeIssuesInFile, RenderPreview, ExecuteSnippet), Testing (purple, 3 tools: GetTestList, RunAllTests, RunSomeTests), Search (blue, 3 tools: XcodeGlob, XcodeGrep, DocumentationSearch), Files (green, 5 tools: XcodeRead, XcodeLS, XcodeMakeDir, XcodeRM, XcodeMV), Edit (red, 2 tools: XcodeWrite, XcodeUpdate), and&10; Misc (gray, 1 tool: XcodeListWindows). Each tool is shown in a white card with a colored left border stripe indicating its category. Cards list the tool name in bold monospace, a one-line description, required and optional parameters, and return values. A footer notes that paths use Xcode project structure and results are truncated at 100 entries.&10;

I connected to Xcode’s MCP server (xcrun mcpbridge), and requested a list of all the tools. Then I threw that at Claude and had it whip up a “cheat sheet”. In case you’re curious what the agents have at their disposal.

The Xcode MCP support exposes a small list of “tools” that can be invoked by agents. They accept parameters and return results of a pre-determined type. Maybe if they keep working on it they’ll invent AppleScript dictionaries.

Still from a video showing an aged Elon Musk being interviewed in a high energy gym.

“By 2030, almost 80% of people had lost their jobs.”

www.aicandy.be/giorgio-1

Listening to the “How I Built This” interview with Jim McKelvey of Square. He acknowledged our dear departed Tristan O’Tierney as the original iOS developer for the service. Tristan always described himself as a “co-founder” ... https://danielpunkass.micro.blog/2026/02/24/listening-to-the-how-i.html

I just hugged my 17-yo son goodnight. It was a good hug. We always tell each other “I love you.” I hugged him at drop-offs in elementary school and other parents lamented “I wish my kids hugged me.” I know every kid is different, but our kids hug us because we always hugged them. That’s the secret.

Cool, I appreciate the attention to detail.