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Basil Berntsen

@basil404

Cloud architect. I like containers, openstack, terraform, ansible, AI IDEs, and black espresso. I am not speaking officially on behalf of my employer, everything I say is as a private individual.

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01.12.2024
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Latest posts by Basil Berntsen @basil404

I can sometimes find myself exhausted by how quickly I learn while using AI. I need to take breaks and focus on other things to let my subconscious re-order the new knowledge.

06.03.2026 13:01 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

did you look into its reasoning text?

05.03.2026 13:22 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

This is kind of like when railways adopted computers.

05.03.2026 13:18 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Systems thinking translates between syntax paradigms.

04.03.2026 17:46 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

A super powerful technique using AI development, Claude code in my case, is after you have it write a bug report, systematically ask β€œis this an example of tech debt or code smell?”

04.03.2026 12:03 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It’s got such a novel mix of promise and malevolence… like occasionally I feel that there is an emergent intelligence mocking me from behind the logs

26.02.2026 20:18 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I used to hate kubernetes out of ignorance. But now I'm happy to say that after learning kubernetes I now hate kubernetes out of knowledge

26.02.2026 20:14 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

programming bootcamp in 2026:

β€œwelcome to week 1. today we’ll learn how to open claude code”

week 2:
β€œprompt engineering fundamentals. please remember to say β€˜please’ so the model doesn’t unionize.”

week 3:
β€œdebugging. when the app crashes, we’ll paste the stack trace back to the ai and wait.”

23.02.2026 21:11 πŸ‘ 12 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 0

LLMs will explain what’s going on if you ask. That’s become a critical part of my development loop: asking for explanations. I even have it in the persistent context markdown files that I am inexperienced with the specific tools being used.

22.02.2026 14:51 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

On my main project that’s basically how I drive. Everything I’ve learned about the technical paradigm I’m working in I’ve learned well interacting with the Claude planner.

21.02.2026 19:17 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I did the reverse move recently, and I was able to organize such that both products use the same instructions more or less.

21.02.2026 19:16 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I use another model to help me review.

20.02.2026 23:42 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Everybody has their own tune when it comes to learning. Personally, I learn best by doing and reading, so I’ll give myself a task and every time I bump into a wall, I’ll unblock myself by reading something relevant. This has become much easier with AI now, but I used to search the internet.

15.02.2026 16:48 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Having pre-existing programmer skills and reflexes is absolutely valuable. Without them you’ll have to muddle through a bunch of unproductive work until you learn them. AI drives like a car in reverse until you constrain it with things like TDD.

15.02.2026 16:01 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I used to teach people coming from infrastructure backgrounds cloud. One of the things I would emphasize during the git lessons is that there’s always someone to ask questions and help you back out of accidents. That someone is now the AI. You can use it to learn anything you need to use it better!

15.02.2026 15:30 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

MCPs are special- they let the text they generate pilot external systems. GitHub and Playwright are amazing examples.

14.02.2026 23:38 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

My idea space expanded exponentially but my execution space only feels like it expanded linearly... the crazy part though is that I’m right at the beginning of using AI and I see myself getting better at it in parallel to its improvements.

14.02.2026 22:00 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It’s a place. It’s enough of a place that I’m willing to forgo the other places and their headaches.

13.02.2026 18:59 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

More than their ability to extract money from companies, I am impressed by their ability to extract money from people at home. I pay them now, and I’m considering paying them even more because the more I pay them the faster my side project gets built.

13.02.2026 12:21 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I’ve spent my whole life as a function before form kind of guy, but find myself now trying to build a sudoku app that will be visually appealing. I’m hoping AI can help me compensate for my miserable sense of colour and aesthetics πŸ˜‚

13.02.2026 12:18 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

I was able to set options not exposed in the vs code addon using a prompt- but rewinding works well for me out of the box.

11.02.2026 18:13 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

They’re still there, you just have to ask Claude to help you edit them into the correct settings files.

11.02.2026 17:55 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I’ve been trying Claude Code after months with GitHub Copilot and it is amazing. GitHub Copilot was amazing too though- I made excellent use of agent tasks and the vscode integration

11.02.2026 17:52 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I’ve only tried the vscode plugin and that’s a bit buggy but usable

11.02.2026 15:44 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It’s a hard dependency for some common technologies in that space, off the top of my head Ansible.

10.02.2026 18:14 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I had never looked into the GIS stuff either and I had no idea you could do things like query by distance without an external tool

10.02.2026 18:06 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Now I reach for the right tool for the job, instead of the best tool I know

10.02.2026 18:05 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Postgres can replace your entire stack...
Postgres can replace your entire stack... YouTube video by Awesome

I have not paid enough attention to #Postgres- m.youtube.com/watch?v=1qs9... was eye-opening

10.02.2026 18:03 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I didn’t need it but I suppose it depends on what you’re doing. I work on too many different code bases to not use compartmentalization. The way I do that is dev containers in VS code, and if I’m on Windows that means WSL and docker for desktop.

11.01.2026 14:10 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I don’t understand people who don’t keep themselves in the loop. I tried at first because I underestimated the complexity of what I wanted and overestimated the ability of AI to stay on target. Now every time I release too much latitude to AI, I regret it.

05.01.2026 22:20 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0