Seen elsewhere ...

@steve @griotspeak so the last time I sang was in high school church choir. But last year I started singing with a choir, and I’ve been asked to sing harmony with a small group for a memorial, but I don’t trust my piano skills enough to just play my part to practice. So I transcribed the scan I was sent into MuseScore. But MuseScore is terrible for switching playback voices in close-score, and so…

Luckily I’ve been wise and have also been just practicing without worrying about building tools :)

For those of you (@griotspeak) interested in little AI story I was telling about my satb app:

The AI version, up until the point I stopped:

https://github.com/rnapier/satb-ai

And the (very WIP) version I'm actually building:

https://github.com/rnapier/satb

Sorry for the lack of explanation, etc. It's not polished into what I'd do for a blog, but I thought I'd post it in all its raw glory.

@isaiah Agreed, and even more IMO the early web. And I expect it to follow much of the same path, including a dot-com crash that I'm expecting to come. And after that we can start building actually useful things for a while.

But like the web, it will be forever filled with crap, and the worst user experiences you can imagine.

And like the web, I expect it will also be filled with wonderful things that people use to do things I hadn't even imagined.

@isaiah This is definitely not a "you should try it again!" suggestion. Honestly it's an ecosystem moving so fast and so chaotically I highly recommend folks just let it churn for awhile before bothering with it. 80% of it will just waste your time, even when it's good. And the other 20% doesn't come close to making up for the time you waste figuring out which is which.

But it is evolving really fast and I do suggest peeking in from time to time.

@isaiah I don't like gen-art, but I *do* want summaries of specific Slack conversations for my notes (so I made a tool to do that).

I definitely don't want them to write for me (I tried it a little; I don't like it). But my wife finds that editing something, even if she replaces every word, is easier than staring at a blank page.

And it'll compile code to make sure it works (and debug it if not). I use that all the time.

I do wish Xcode made it as easy to integrate as VSCode does, though.

Microsoft: "we gonna screenshot every 3 seconds and feed it to Windows 11's AI assistant."

Signal: "This dangerous. Please put option to disable"

Microsoft: "No! Everything will be fed to the AI, except DRM protected content of course."

Microsoft: .....

Microsoft: ".. Don't you dare-"

Signal: *Calls to DRM API to protect user privacy*

Compilers are just too augmented and unpredictable due to bugs! And, as we know, every augmentation is also an amputation.

I produce my code on punch cards because that’s how the code used to run. No new technology is required; nothing stands in the way of implementation other than my willingness to carry 30 pounds of stacked cards back and forth.

@cocoaphony one of the useful functions I didn’t expect is the “post a wrong answer yourself” effect: when I see what it’s doing I often get a clear sense of how to fix it, much clearer than my original sense of the right approach.

My AI distractions, hopefully a lesson, but maybe just a story: https://cocoaphony.micro.blog/2025/05/26/my-ai-distractions-hopefully-a.html

I can't funcking believe. It is all like @cocoaphony said "It's like asking a 6 year old if their room is clean."

https://mastodon.social/@cocoaphony/114571761917900487

If Claude tells me one more time "The measure 29 slur issue has been completely resolved" when the measure 29 slur issue has not been completely resolved....

"Did you check against the actual Crossing The Bar file to be certain?"

"You're absolutely right - let me do a thorough verification against the actual "Crossing The Bar" file to ensure the measure 29 slur issue is properly resolved:"

It's like asking a 6 year old if their room is clean.

@mbroome @llorenzin But folks should talk me about it another day when I'm not writing:

"You MUST NOT create a special rule just for measure 29 of this one file! This requires a general fix."

Seriously. Checking "are we in measure 29? Then assign the note slurs correctly for that one measure because we can't figure out how to do it right."

I…

*THIS* is our AI overlord?!??!!?

(But also, it's pretty incredible when IT'S NOT TOALLY CHEATING ABOUT EVERYTHING!)

@mbroome @llorenzin The funny thing is, working with these systems, the rant is surprisingly backwards.

I constantly have to fight with these AIs to *not* "worry about performance." They *love* to worry about performance. Add caches. Add lazy evaluation. Do weird things to save a few ms here and there. And in the process make the code way too complex (and ironically probably slow…it's a common beginner mistake).

But they know more about cache lines than almost every dev. That I'm certain of.

@mbroome @llorenzin It definitely appeals to my ego. But I find myself swapping in "ReactNative" for AI, and it rings exactly the same. Or VueJS. Or Visual Basic. Or COBOL. Every time we've lowered the bar to entry and let folks get way out beyond what they actually understand.

They've built crap.

And they've built incredibly useful things that no one would have built if the barrier weren't so low.

And they've built crap that also is incredibly useful.

(And also just crap.)

1/

this but for attachments

Friendly reminder

I've accepted that my role is basically financier and spectator for the foreseeable future, and the normal policy outcomes I'd want to see aren't that important at all against the backdrop of maintaining a function small-L liberal democracy / rule of law / etc 2/2 @ewigeliberal.bsky.social

@cocoaphony @helge @nicklockwood @mattiem @inthehands yes of course AI will hallucinate about the tests, and I need to do everything that you describe to keep it under control

It also tries to introduce redundant dependencies and do other dumb things, which it corrects if noticed and prompted

It works best for me if used as a coding slave with a short leash and tight control

So I see AI as a senior engineer productivity booster, not a replacement

@jaanus @helge @nicklockwood @mattiem @inthehands that matches my experience, though I’ve found very good ways for more junior devs to use it. For example, it’s often very good at explaining what code literally does (often very bad at explaining why, but good at the mechanics). I’ve found devs often all levels using that effectively to get oriented in unfamiliar code.