Kyle Fox

Absolutely — it's not nearly as difficult as it sounds! I'm still learning and probably doing lots wrong myself 😅

Claude Code has blown my fucking mind this week.

Huge unlocks:

- MCP: Puppeteer, Postgres, Linear
- Tweaking CLAUDE.md
- Adding CLAUDE.md to subdirectories (i.e. tests)
- Claude commands
- Github CLI

I am all-in on this.

Was gonna jump in and say the same thing. I’d been leaning towards focusing more on React purely to get more mileage out of AI tools, but the latest round of tools seems to have gotten a lot better with the “traditional” Rails stack.

Man, I’ve been programming for ~20 years and I felt like that this week too.

Imagine that scene from Pulp Fiction with “PARDON ME?” instead of “WHAT?”

It's baffling that Uber sends me alerts about cheap rides, as if I'm just waiting to go on a random car ride with a stranger and my only hangup is price.

There are a handful of apps I need push notifications from that ALSO send me marketing push notifications, but don't give me a way to disable *only* the marketing notifications.

These apps know I'm not going to disable push notifications completely, so they spam me with impunity.

Apple needs a way to report push notifications as spam on iOS.

Yup, exactly.

Whatever generation came before boomers.

Oh don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a love story about partials & helpers 🤣 haven’t tried phlex but have been meaning to for exactly this reason. One file, one language.

ViewComponents feel similar to abstracted CSS because I can't just look at a ViewComponent and understand exactly what it's doing. Which (like abstracted CSS) is fine for simple things but can quickly become unwieldy.

No idea if this makes sense, I'm on a lot of cold medication at the moment 🤣

Working with abstracted CSS (i.e. class names for components) increases cognitive load because I often have to think about the required DOM structure (usually referencing an existing example), how the CSS actually works, and how changes to the CSS could cascade to (and break) other parts of the app.

It reminds me a lot of abstracting styling with CSS vs using Tailwind utility classes.

Tailwind is appealing to me because it colocates markup + styling. You can look at a chunk of HTML and know exactly what it's doing. It may look messy, but I never have to go find & reverse engineer other files.

Honestly it's actually not bad, I'm exaggerating 😊

It's a super well-built library that solves a painful problem well. I actually love it for many things.

But like all abstractions, it introduces another layer between the programmer.

I think I hate ViewComponents 🤔 #rails

How much collective human energy has been wasted redesigning custom checkboxes, radio buttons, selects, etc. that function WORSE than native browser defaults?

Tip: If you add it to your cart and then leave the website, they might email you a coupon.

After ~20 years of writing code, I'm convinced that literally the ONLY metric that matters for code quality is:

How easy is it to change?

Copypasta is freedom, abstractions are cement shoes.

- Reference: faster than looking through API docs

- Cleanup: "Make this code more idiomatic and concise, using the latest libraries"

- Brainstorming: "I need to do <thing>, I have ideas <a, b, c>, help me evaluate them and suggest alternatives"

- Troubleshooting: "why isn't this code working?"

For the time being I've given up on agentic coding. Seems like no matter which model or tool I use, and no matter how much I finesse prompts — it just generates a frustrating mess more often than not.

That said, I still constantly use AI as a coding sidekick for stuff like:

At least they didn't start the headline with "Hard-hitting daily"

well it’s Sunday morning and these Hydraulic Press videos aren’t going to watch themselves

Yeah, it's great for this.

BTW, maybe you already know this but in case not: if you're using VS Code, ChatGPT can automatically read your open editor tabs if you allow it. (I'm sure you can do this with other editors too).

This frame from a @github.com Copilot tutorial video really captures the essence of the Copilot experience.

It's like 30 seconds of this prelude garbage before I can even type out my issue!

Hello!

(fake typing)

My name is Sam!

(fake typing)

Hope you're having a great day!

(fake typing)

First, let's find out more about you!

(fake typing)

What's your name?

(fake typing)

Great to meet you!

(fake typing)

Now, what's your email address?

(fake typing)

How can I help you today?

I'm at the point where AI chat bots send me into a blinding rage, anyone else?

I know you're a Rails enthusiast, so this tracks 🥁

I can understand this point of view, but the same thing has happened to the entire computing stack over time. Complexity is abstracted and built upon. Right now it feels scary only because we're in a transitory state and AI isn't fully reliable.