A couple of things that really helped me (Claude is my choice for coding):

- add to your global settings a few lines that say something like "don't write any code until you fully understand my requirements, ask questions until you are completely clear", this mostly stops it just going ahead and writing best guess just the first time. And then,

- when it looks it's going off the rails, cut your loses straight away and ask it to write a prompt for another chat. Tell it to cover everything it knows about what you're working on and what you want to do. Paste that into the new chat and get it to ask if it needs clarification (and then if needed, paste between the two chats). The new chat often solves the problem the other one was stuck on first time.

Hope they help - coding with AI has made me enjoy the process once again. I'm actually completely silly projects I've always wanted to do because I can get past the blockers so much more easily.

ChatGPT really impressed me on this one:

Sing, O Muse, of the Chucking of Wood

Sing, O Muse, of the stout-hearted woodchuck, Dweller of hills, whom men call groundhog, Whose paws, though small, could hurl mighty timbers, If fate had gifted him such labor divine.

Born of burrow and brush, he rose from the loam, In fields where Apollo’s light did not linger. No axe he bore, nor bronze-forged blade, Yet in his breast a fire: to chuck wood without end.

Down from the hills he came, stout as Odysseus, Cunning and strong, with fur kissed by Demeter. The trees did tremble at his gaze, And even old oak whispered, “Beware!”

“Would he chuck?” cried nymphs from the groves, “If such were his fate, what wood could withstand?” Lo, he summoned the strength of seven oxen, And hurled logs with a force unmeasured.

Seven hundred pounds of timber he cast, Each arc a hymn to muscle and will. Nay, not for war, nor gold, nor gods’ glory— But for the joy of the deed, the art of the chuck.

Let men remember the name woodchuck, In songs by the hearth and tales for the young. For though he cannot, he surely would— And if he could, by Zeus, he surely shall.

In the notation of this page, the entropy H(P) is best thought of as:

"The mean number of bits to encode a member of P, assuming an optimal code."

And the KL divergence KL(P,Q) is probably best thought of as:

"The mean number of WASTED bits if you encode members of P assuming that they had come from Q."

For the longest time I've been using vims built-in `compiler` feature with tartansandal/vim-compiler-pytest combined tpope/vim-dispatch

I like how critique of LLMs evolved on this site over the last few years.

We are currently at nonsensical pacing while writing novels.

Highly recommend "Stories of Your Life and Others".

I describe Ted Chiang as a very human sci-fi author, where humanity comes before technology in his stories. His work is incredibly versatile, and while I expected sci-fi, I'd actually place him closer to fantasy. Perfect for anyone who enjoys short stories with a scientific, social, or philosophical twist.

Another anthology I'd recommend with fresh ideas is Axiomatic by Greg Egan.

Related, updating difftastic and friends if you installed via cargo:

  cargo install cargo-update
  cargo install-update --list
  cargo install-update --all

Other fun Rust projects available via cargo:

https://mise.jdx.dev/ mise-en-place, a drop-in replacement for asdf https://asdf-vm.com/ that is really fast and flexible.

https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide is a fantastic cd replacement, which stores where you cd to, and you can then do a partial match like "z hel" might take you to "~/projects/helloworld".

https://github.com/bootandy/dust is a compliment to "du", shows which directories are using the most disk space.