just f***ing use html

 Funny rant domain: Just f***ing use HTML. (Is it weird that I'm "censoring" cussing?)

(Not to nerdily miss the point, but I think the PHP/JSON-on-Filesystem//HTML5/CSS/Vanilla JS stack  is the logical extension of that when you actually do need to get a little data onto or off of the server. Buildless, evergreen, runs for years, avoids package dependency hell...)

It reminds me of The iPhone is a piece of s***, and so is your face, extolling the virtues of the clever foldy keyboard Nokia E70 over the then new iPhone. Obviously iPhone-ish slabphones won - but it took iPhone a while to catch up to that -- recording video, an app store, even copy and paste weren't there at first...

(I suspect that second rant page - a "cgi" page still surviving like almost two decades now - has the same "technology should just work for years" attitude of the first rant.)

the new assembly

I've always liked Processing and P5.js as ways of... just having a little canvas to do cool low level graphics and interactions and small games in. He's got some kind of campaign going using this splash image:

It was interesting seeing the blob of code on the left. It reminded me that while I can still "live code" P5 ok I'm starting to get rusty about some of the bread and butter commands (like if "stroke()" was for color or width)

But then somehow it's like... there's that line that says "Javascript is the new assembly language of the web", that people will be coding in higher level things that turn into JS. But now with so many people coasting on LLM, it kind of feels like there might be a time when, any code whatsoever will have that "assembly language" vibe. 

text editing is hard

 79: Text editing with Michael … - Complementary - Apple Podcasts

Heh. Katie Langerman is a designer I worked with at CarGurus, and she's been working at GitHub, and she cohosts a design podcast... it was a little triggering - relivingsome things we're struggling with at my current job -  but they had a whole episode on "text editing". ProseMirror comes up a lot. And the issue of rich text editing are thorny for everyone. (Like if the user copies and pastes from inside a bullet item list, maybe not respecting item boundaries... what all should that even look like on paste, in terms of what structure should it assume or replace or ignore... )

AI doesn't replace best practices

 At work in our AI discussion forum someone posted this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4F1gFy-hqg

One thing I'm wrestling with is... how do devs/LLM-wranglers ensure we get good "value for money" in terms of the pre-prompting stuff? To a large extent, decent coding practices are built into LLM. (Admittedly, the LLMs have been more trained on toy example which might cause them to be more likely to take shortcuts.) So in theory, it might not make sense to stuff your context window with things the LLM already knows deeply. (Or maybe this is a false economy, and that the number of tokens spent compared to what can be saved is small... this is why non-deterministic programming might always have an aspect "as much an art as a science.")
 
Another topic I want to refine my thinking on is testing. The TDD (Test Driven Development) mindset makes a case for itself more strongly in this LLM world in versus what we had before - in part because of the "pain in the butt factor" of it all. In UI at least, most medium to low level tests depend on content pieces (page structure, test-ids) that aren't in place UNTIL implementation - real chicken and egg stuff, where you would have to architect fine grained structure while writing the test, which isn't really a comfortable way to work. But with an AI, that discomfort might not exist (or at least not felt by humans)
 
Finally I wonder about the "software fundamental" of unit test. Like, I LOVE that this video suggests "grey box" modularization - limiting coupling to specific points between higher level modules. To me that points to where the real value in testing is, at integration of those modules, and end to end testing. In the old world, it was difficult to get real value from unit tests, tests that were real canaries in the coal mine vs false alarms, so I was always in the camp that preferred higher level tests.
But I'm not quite sure what the answer is for the LLM world. Anecdotes suggest that sometimes LLM care about tests too much, will keep code around just because there's a test for it after a refactoring. I appreciate that at the very least LLMs have helped lower the cost of unit test creation.