sockgrant (u/sockgrant)

sockgrant commented on Grief and the AI split blog.lmorchard.com/2026/0... · Posted by u/avernet

g-b-r · 3 days ago

> it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the high unit test coverage, nagging bug fixes, etc., they’re all trivial to do now.

It can help if you write poor code without it, probably

High unit test coverage only means something if you carefully check those tests, and if everything was tested

sockgrant · 3 days ago

The only way Claude can help improve your code cleanliness is if you write poor code?

Code coverage means nothing if you didn't carefully check every test? "and if everything was tested" do you know what code coverage is?

not gonna engage the trolling

sockgrant commented on Grief and the AI split blog.lmorchard.com/2026/0... · Posted by u/avernet

tern · 3 days ago

Came here to say something similar. For me, the craft aspect is now even more exciting because I can craft more ambitious things without getting bogged down in the details. For me, refining my conceptual model, drawing diagrams, finding the right way to think about something was the craft.

Maybe that's another way of saying: I was trained as a designer, and now the distinction between design (read: architecture, service-design, product, ux, cx) and programming is blurring.

sockgrant · 3 days ago

Heck yeah! Love that way of putting it. Agree. Now there’s more time to focus on making the right architecture and carrying it out. It’s no longer a days long task to do a big refactor to remove code smells.

sockgrant commented on Grief and the AI split blog.lmorchard.com/2026/0... · Posted by u/avernet

Roguelazer · 3 days ago

The important thing to remember is that for a large number of people (in the US), "work" is a place where they do things that they hate for eight hours a day, for people they hate (surveys routinely show between 40% and 60% of people are "satisfied" with their jobs). Those of us who are in the tech industry because we like actually programming computers (the "craft-lovers", in the parlance of this blog post) have been lucky enough to have jobs where where we get to actually do something we enjoy (even if it's intermingled with meetings and JIRA). If AI slop really is the future and programming becomes as rare of a job as hand-building wood furniture, then most of us are going to be living the normal experience of capitalism in a way that we are probably not well-prepared for.

Personally, I have noticed that I still produce substantially more and better code than the people at my company spending all day writing prompts, so I'm not too worried yet, but it seems plausible at some point that a machine that stole every piece of software ever written will be able to reliably turn a few hundred watt-hours of of electricity into a hallucination-free PR.

sockgrant · 3 days ago

I agree some people go to work to work, and claude is find / good for them, but I feel that characterization of us who are loving claude is disingenuous. I’m a creative, while I loved coding and honed my craft, it was creating that always had me hooked. Claude is creating on steroids. Not to mention, it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the high unit test coverage, nagging bug fixes, etc., they’re all trivial to do now.

It’s not the same as writing code, but it’s fun.

If your coworkers can’t outpace your code output they’re either not using opus4.6 or they aren’t really trying.

It’s pretty easy to slam 20 PRs a day with some of them being complex changes. The hardest part is testing the diffs, but people are figuring that out too.

sockgrant commented on AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power chrbutler.com/what-ai-is-... · Posted by u/delaugust

sockgrant · 4 months ago

“As a designer…”

IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first.

Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile.

I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I think the innovation is lagging in other areas. I don’t doubt they don’t yet have compelling AI tooling.

sockgrant commented on First do it, then do it right, then do it better twitter.com/addyosmani/st... · Posted by u/erfanebrahimnia

coldtea · 2 years ago

>You basically webdev with it and have a native looking app.

That's a description of the problem.

sockgrant · 2 years ago

It’s also a description of why native wasn’t chosen from the get go.

This thread is people who ship products vs people who ship engineering.

sockgrant commented on First do it, then do it right, then do it better twitter.com/addyosmani/st... · Posted by u/erfanebrahimnia

PH95VuimJjqBqy · 2 years ago

Electron is only good enough because the companies themselves aren't paying the cost of it (resources and performance).

what gets considered important are things that hurt them rather than their users. In many ways it's an abuse of users.

sockgrant · 2 years ago

The companies do pay a cost — lost users and revenue due to the downsides.

But they’ve determined that this cost isn’t meaningful enough to write performant native platform specific versions.

sockgrant commented on First do it, then do it right, then do it better twitter.com/addyosmani/st... · Posted by u/erfanebrahimnia

j1elo · 2 years ago

On the other hand, in software-related matters, I have the increasing feeling that kludges and temporary decisions made in the "First do it" stage, tend to get carried on to infinity through the other phases.

Thus, lots of stuff that falls in the "Important, but Not Urgent" category of the Eisenhower Matrix end up never getting its proper development time. One could argue "well, then maybe they weren't actually that important, were they?" but I'd reply that usually the criteria to define something as important is measured with growth potential, and that's the wrong bar to use.

That's how we end up with "we'll build it in Electron for the time being and later will rebuild in proper native apps if the idea works" ends up being still Electron 10 years later. Or how "we'll make our own controls and later worry about accessibility" turns out never worrying about it.

sockgrant · 2 years ago

Yeah but if something stays in Electron 10 years later then either it’s not successful enough to warrant the cost of a rewrite or the payoff of the rewrite isn’t a good trade off.

In both cases if originally building in Electron was a substantial productivity boost then it sounds like it was the right choice.

sockgrant commented on Go with PHP gowithphp.com/... · Posted by u/eiiot

joering2 · 3 years ago

I think its a great reminder to code with whatever you feel comfortable. For example, my last project I did in Centos/Apache/PHP5/Code Igniter 3.1 with some WASP for protection I did for 12 years and sold few months ago. It checks out against Qualys Server test and ImmuniWeb very well. I sold it for close to $10MM with annual revenues of $1.6MM. The last question the new owner asked me was "what did you program it with?". They mostly want bunch of boring excel spreadsheets seeing where I am, how the sales are sustained, and how do I believe it can grow. On the final day, their IT guy showed up. He looked in silence through 45 minutes of my code's presentation, which is very much mix of OO and not OO, and his only words were "I don't like frameworks if that was me I would start the whole thing from scratch".

So you never know what or whom you gonna get, but the bottom line is if you have sales and revenues and keep tabs on spending, they will come, and they will not care less about your fancy framework or newest code implementations.

TLDR: code in whatever you feel comfortable but always consider security as top priority (not speed) because in production your code's/setup security mistakes can cost you serious legal troubles.

sockgrant · 3 years ago

Gotta love engineers. 45 minutes of reading 12 years of someone’s work and the first thing they say is “yeah I’d rewrite it”.

Every. Dang. Engineer. It’s crazy.

I try to work in a codebase for 3-6 months before coming to any wild conclusions. Usually you find that there’s some warts but it does the job and there’s complexity that was solved that you hadn’t originally noticed, and it’s not worth rewriting it just needs some love in some areas.

People hate reading other peoples code.

sockgrant commented on A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview interviewing.io/guides/sy... · Posted by u/leeny

dilyevsky · 3 years ago

Like other commenter pointed out you were interviewing for what basically amounts to “tech lead” role without relevant experience. I’m not sure other L4-5s on the team would be happy if someone less experienced is hired in a TL role

sockgrant · 3 years ago

Was on a team this happened on and a lot of the l4 l5 Eng gossiped about how little our L7 knew