Alex Hart 🇨🇦

Maple latte in a teal cup with some mid latte art

Weekend morning maple latte 🙂

A golden rule for working with LLMs doing code gen.

Don't trust. Verify.

Use that extra time you've saved to write some unit tests 😂

Claude Code has been an absolute force multiplier when working on my side project. I no longer feel burn out, and I get more done. Just need to remember that force multiplication applies to negative values too 😅

Unfortunate that these are the only two I've seemed to be able to find, but there's always graphicsLayer {} if you have multiple properties changing at the same time!

Kotlin can allow both, couldn't it? Just utilize a parameter with a default value. Kotlin defaults kind of give us the best of both worlds here.

Is this pictured as a transformation of the entire SW career? How do we get, keep, and mentor juniors and the next generation of engineers in this new world?

The human will need to be there for at the very least quite a long time I think, as machines thus far completely lack empathy.

I tried to swipe "holy" on my keyboard and it autofilled "guilty" and that is just so on the nose for someone raised Catholic.

Latercase emailing me about purchasing an iPhone case a month after I bought the exact one they're trying to hawk is... Ballsy.

Oh yeah material is making me crash out today what in the absolute hell

If I crash out today it's gonna be because of Material Design's AnimatedPane

Ultimately makes that worth it to me are two things. For one, there are 30 to 50 classes that have this DSL embedded into them and need to be rewritten.

Secondly, I don't need to sit and watch it work. I can use a work tree and separate AS insurance to keep an eye on it but otherwise work elsewhere

Is It Worth the Time?

Using an AI agent to help write and modify code reminds me of the "time to write vs time saved" xkcd.

I'm working through a fairly large prompt to refactor out an old DSL I wrote to swap it with compose, and I'm fairly confident I can get it working within a few hours or so. What

xkcd.com/1205/

A sad state of affairs as both reading and writing are very healthy for your brain.

It's been a long time coming but I'm super proud of us for getting this out the door!

If you're a senior+ developer and your GitHub looks like this.... I assume you have some mixture of positive work life balance, a spouse and children, and hobbies outside of coding.

What I don't assume is anything about your ability to write great software.

Latte with an attempt at a flower of some sort.

Morning Latte. I think I have the beans almost dialed in and the oat milk is frothing well enough. #coffee #espresso

Maple Oat latee with some mid latte art

Coffee this morning :-) Maple Oat Latte

"To be clear, developers will have the same freedom to distribute their apps directly to users through sideloading or to use any app store they prefer."

I remember checking if the view passed into my ListView method was null or not.

The senior developer you admire was once a beginner who Googled how to add a click listener and then copied the answer from StackOverflow.

They’re not smarter than you, just further ahead.

Signal News & Tips (@aboutsignal@mastodon.social) Attached: 1 image Meta AI, the honest spokesperson for #WhatsApp 🤣

mastodon.social/@aboutsignal...

I remember we saw a home we liked and it ended up having a *wooden* foundation 😵‍💫

"looked at a house... Foundation---" don't walk run

And the need for high quality SWEs especially for projects dealing with sensitive areas like finance or cryptography, need that oversight. Furthermore, there is a human element to SWEs in understanding intent and empathizing with users that I don't think we would ever truly get in AI.

Suggests and that's very easy to do with the command line tools they provide. Nothing goes into my work that I've not personally looked at, verified, and understand. And someone vibe coding does not have the skill set to do that, software engineers do. Tools like Claude are just prediction engines

I will say, the initial tests it wrote did require some finessing to get working properly. I do not think AI like this is a replacement for senior devs, and I still think companies trying to replace junior devs with LLMs are short sighted. I manually review and massage every change Claude Code

Whatever we are most passionate about.

Like I could still stand up to new challenges before the day was done. That in and of itself is a superpower of this technology. We as software engineers love solving problems. Claude Code doesn't remove that, it's just another lever. It assists us in writing the boring stuff, so we can focus on

My biggest win with Claude was that after a few hours of using it to author some otherwise dry and repetitive unit tests through some important code, was that *I* still felt fresh. I wasn't exhausted by the banality of getting them done, I didn't procrastinate. I still felt, hours into my work day

I started using Claude Code on Friday, and have a couple insights after a day of using it. The initialization process over a code repository is very cool, and it's ability to conform to your codebases style is awesome. It also seems like it will pick up on library usage like avoiding spys in mockk