AI LLM Shootout

Realizing that large language models are imperfect as a user interface, I had the idea last week what if I could use them to translate documentation into some of the tools like fish shell and Dash to augment their data and improve my efficiency. This way rather than having to wait for the LLM to load or referring back to it, I can get my assistance where it’s most convenient.

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Visual Studio Code is Still Buggy

Many years ago I was a Sublime Text user and looked at new text editors given Sublime had not been receiving updates. The most popular editor these days is Visual Studio Code. When I tried it in 2021 I could not use it because it would flicker on my 4K monitor when I scrolled. I suppose I should not have been shocked when it was still buggy in 2024.

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The Hard Parts of Technical Debt

I have been spending a large part of the past month or two battling the dragon we call technical debt. Technical debt is an often invoked but challenging to understand aspect of software engineering. To outsiders it can seem subjective: engineers dislike some sort of code, label it legacy code or tech debt, and try to convince product or management to let them work on fixing that instead of stories that provide value. This can happen, but is not fully accurate. Tech debt is real because the bill for it eventually comes due.

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How I am Using Apple Vision Pro

It has been a few weeks with the Apple Vision Pro and the hype has died down at this point. The reviews have been in and many people have tapered their enthusiasm for it after hearing about its limitations. Despite the challenges I happily kept mine. I use it nearly every day.

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Why Tricks and Snippets Beat Custom Tools for Developer Experience

A common pattern I see programmers try is to write little scripts and utilities to streamline repetitive tasks. A program might arrive with a small app in “./bin/utility” you can add to your $PATH and quickly execute on things. These scripts and utilities are well meaning, but long term they tend to break. Once they do, their value proposition evaporates.

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This work by Matt Zagaja is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.