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You can, but:

- Good code is what enables you to be able to build very complex software without an unreasonable number of bugs.

- Good code is what enables you to be responsive to changing customer needs and times. Whether you view that as valuable is another matter though. I guess it is a business decision. There have been plenty of business that have gone bust though by neglecting that.

Good code is for your own sanity, the machine does not care.


Also one big tell that is hard to hide is making verbose lists with fluff but little actual informative content.

Ask an LLM to read your project specs and add a section headed: Performance Optimizations, to see an example of this

Another is a certain punchy and sensationalist style that does not change throughout a longer piece of writing.


One of my subtle favorites is the “H2 Heading with: Colorful Description”

Eg - The Strait of Hormuz: Chokepoint or Opportunity?


I’ve used titles like that for thirty years.

I'm going to ask the qustion I ask everyone who makes the claim that they wrote like that for years: Can you show us a link from prior 2022 that you wrote like that?

No, of course not. It’s all corporate internal documentation.

I suppose my high school essays were not. Apologies, but those are lost.


Nobody owes you evidence for your witch hunts.

Sure, but, look, we have seen these claims so many times, that if it were true by now someone would have linked at least one archived blog post to show that it is, indeed, how humans used to write.

The lack of a single example is very telling.


Sure, and an LLM-written article will use that pattern eight times in two pages.

Exactly, it's the monotony of the style that gives it away.

And apparently they killed more during the mission to retrieve this guy

> striking Iranian military-aged males believed to be a threat who got within three kilometer” according to a correspondent with the US Air & Space Forces Magazine, who said he had been briefed on the operation.


There was apparently a large multi hour firefight, which oh so conveniently no one is covering

I guess now would be a good time for China to make its move on you-know-who.

I'm starting to believe that China isn't going to make the move. It's winning the hearts and minds of the rest of the world and will be able to leverage its growing soft power well beyond what Taiwan would provide. I just don't see them giving up the position the US has abandoned.

I'm starting to think so as well. The Chinese are typically cautious geopolitically, and very strategic. They may well have made the calculus that for the foreseeable future, they have more to gain from keeping the status quo re Taiwan while their rivals score own goals, waiting for a possible rapprochement with Taiwan on favorable terms.

That's something the factions in the Middle East miss: sometimes great change comes from patiently applying pressure and infiltrating from within, rather than a frontal attack.


China's better move rn would be to go for the big soft power play and ditch the Russians for the abandoned Europeans.

China doesn't think in that way. It doesn't make permanent alliances. It is always open to reach limited, scoped deals in fields where it benefits them.

Yeah that sounds like a pretty good deal. Drop the bankrupt Russians and do a deal with us Europeans, a much richer market, to brace against US economic warfare.

I suspect that China might be Russia's Ukraine offramp. If Russia decides to pull out, China can come in and work as a negotiator and win brownie points with the EU. I could see them being able to continue working with both Russia and the EU in that future.

I suspect that they are willing to wait a few more years until they have built up their own chip making capacity so that disrupting Formosa won’t strongly affect their own economy, while it will hinder other developed countries.

I'm not so sure about that. Taiwan pro-reunification party still grows, and its economy is hyper-specialized (not surprising, neocolonialism etc). If china's chip production capacity reach acceptable level (which it will), enough to put downward pressure on lesser chip, Taiwan economy might suffer enough that they vote for a reunification, probably as an autonomous regions (like Guangxi or Ningxia). That would be China's ultimate win.

Not just yet, they should wait for a little bit. The US isn't done depleting its inventory yet, the US might get itself in a lot deeper yet, and the US population will only detest the war even more given time. All of those things will help China take Taiwan. If Iran gets ugly enough the US population will just have that much less willingness to get involved in another major conflict. 3-18 months for Taiwan (9-18 more likely; China still needs some prep). There's no scenario where China isn't going to successfully take the island after this. They now know the US isn't at all prepared to stand off with them in coastal Asia. It would take years of surge production to get ready, the US doesn't have years re Taiwan.

If China is going in, we'll start to see large signs of that. They'll begin a number of prominent campaigns, including sabotage, propaganda, extremely large supply movements, and so on.


> The US isn't done depleting its inventory yet

Yes, reading articles like this one, I suspect it's going to be the lack of firepower that causes this administration to finally back out of the conflict. And with these number it sounds like it might be sooner than later.


If China were to learn anything important from Russia and the USAs "swift" wars it's: don't do it. They'll have the upper hand but a determined government and population will bog down their efforts for years and potentially destabilize politics at home.

Yay, after 2000 years they now accepted Jesus /s

For me, one major issue with md is that it does not support indentation that could be used for collapsing sections.

Most md editors don't support collapsing or folding sections, even though they could. VSCode had this feature where indentation is used as a simple hint to support collapsible sections, but md treats indentation as a code hint.


This is of course subjective, but I would give a lot to have an alternative to Claude Code and the Claude models, but there just isn't anything comparable that works well in an integrated manner for agentic coding.

It's not like I haven't tried. Gemini CLI is still trash (it's probably a bit better now, but I still can't see the edits it proposes, well, etc.). I tried OpenCode, the whole experience was frustrating: the models give up mid-task, they run rampant with actions, the CLI does not offer the level of control and customization Claude Code offers, etc.

I've also tried the other major tools: Codex, Cursor, Cline, Aider, and others, nothing works for me. You are surprised people stick to Claude Code, I am surprised people bother with the other tools.

Maybe it has something to do with how I use the agentic tools: I use the CLI almost exclusively, rarely using the IDE (unless I want to actually code myself). I also almost always approve each and every edit. As such, my number one concern is for the tool to provide me with proper control in a simple and reliable manner: I want a rich permission system that works, and I want to see each proposed edit very clearly in an ergonomic diff format. I want to be able to type, recall, and edit my commands easily too. These are things Claude Code excels at that the other just don't.

The best I've been able to do is to use third-party routers to enable me use Claude Code with almost-SOTA models, and this is the approach that shows the most promise. I'd hate to be beholden to Anthropic's shenanigans.


Have you all actually read the article?

"In the U.S., it has been estimated that the foldable iPhone may start at or above $1,999"

Awesome.


Prosperity?

As in Operation Prosperity Guardian /s


I think what will eventually help is something I call AI-discipline. LLMs are a tool, not more, no less. Just like we now recognize unbridled use of mobile phones to be a mental health issue, causing some to strictly limit their use, I think we will eventually recognize that the best use of LLMs is found by being judicious and intentional.

When I first started dabbling in the use of LLMs for coding, I almost went overboard trying to build all kinds of tools to maximize their use: parallel autonomous worktree-based agents, secure sandboxing for agents to do as they like, etc.

I now find it much more effective to use LLMs in a target and minimalist manner. I still architecturally important and tricky code by hand, using LLMs to do several review passes. When I do write code with LLMs, I almost never allow them to do it without me in the loop, approving every single edit. I limit the number of simultaneous sessions I manage to at most 3 or 4. Sometimes, I take a break of a few days from using LLMs (and ofter from writing any code at all), and just think and update the specs of the project(s) I'm working on at a high level, to ensure I not doing busy-work in the wrong direction.

I don't think I'm missing anything by this approach. If anything, I think I am more productive.


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