If you’re truly honest about wanting to improve your skills then do not use AI!

Just write code. Any code! It doesn’t matter. Spend the hours problem solving and debugging and banging your head against the wall. That’s how we all learned and gained experience. But also reach out and seek help about specific problems you can’t solve.

For a project idea, how about a program that uses the Lemmy API to scan resent posts for Python topics. It’s something that can start basic but can be expanded upon. Start simple by just scanning posts from the last day. Then expand by adding a configurable date range, scanning several communities, multiple topics, presenting notifications, etc.

That’s a terrible take and its desperately trying to draw an equivalence where there isn’t one.

I’d argue that the slop code creates more drudgery with having to constantly babysit the LLM. Never mind a new blog post every week about how your “agentic workflow” from last week is all wrong and you need even more infrastructure to wrangle the LLM. It’s worse than the way the JavaScript ecosystem used to be!

Reading someone else’s code is challenging, but at least with a person you can ask them questions or debate.

I guess I’m just someone who finds reviewing someone else’s work tedious, though a necessary part of the job.

I get the impression this is common. It seems like education hasn’t caught up to the fact that a lot of people are wanting to learn software engineering, but they lack some fundamentals. There really should be an intro course going all the way from what is a file to maybe some basics about the ELF format? Sort of something that can lead into the OS course, but lay the foundation for just basic computer use. Let the nerds get their easy A, but give everyone else a better understanding and some fundamentals to build on.

I wonder how many of these folks just don’t know about the alternatives. I’ve come across otherwise capable developers who think git and GitHub are the same thing. People come to software from all sorts of backgrounds so I can’t blame anyone for not knowing.

I also imagine that if people are aware, the activation energy of switching is too high. It’s more than just setting a new remote and pushing. You have to learn the new system, maybe migrate tickets, wrestle with CI, etc. For a hobby project it’s probably easier to shut it down and just go do something else. I also don’t blame them here. There’s more to life than open source, and its amazing people are able to contribute when they can.

Indeed! I think packages like Doom Emacs help, but the learning curve is still steep.

But I do think leaning Emacs was one of the best things I’ve done!

laughs in Emacs

It is unfortunate though, since Zed did seem to have potential. But I can’t say I’m surprised given their focus on vibe coding instead if making a good editor.

I recently had to tell one of my juniors to turn off his AI tools. His code was just all over the place and difficult to review. He still has a lot to learn, but I’ve already seen an improvement now that he actually has to be a bit thoughtful.

Very much so. I bet most of those people have never run an open source project or business, but they all have an opinion.

Pretty sad to hear this though since I really like Tailwind. I wonder how many other projects this vibe coding bullshit will harm. So sad to see more wealth being concentrated instead of being distributed.

.clone() everything!

I do kind of agree in a way though. Rust forces you to think a bit about memory and the language does tend to guide towards good design. But it’s not magic and it’s easy to write inefficient Rust too. Especially if you just clone everything. But I personally find Rust to be a good mix of low level control that feels sufficiently high level.

Garbage collected languages can be memory efficient too though. Having easily shared references is great!

Loooolll! I love them raising a stink about forking I’m another language. Go for it! Nobody cares and I’m sure it’ll reach feature parity by the time paru is updated. 🙄 And then mentioning Lunduke saying something negative about Rust. Isn’t he some wacko conspiracy/Linux YouTuber? That all made for a good laugh.

Anyway, I really like Paru, but I’ve switched back to yay until they get a fix. Really not a big deal.

Doom Emacs on Arch with Plasma.

“Agentic Engineering”. No, it’s called vibe coding. AI bros are so desperate for legitimacy they make up fancy sounding titles for themselves.

But this isn’t engineering. Engineering takes rigor and discipline and process and understanding… A lot of it is extremely boring too. The code itself is probably the easiest (and I’d argue least important) part of software engineering. These guys are burning down forests to poorly automate the easy part.

I’m not saying that coding is easy in an absolute sense, but only relative to the rest of the discipline. A good engineer knows how to design/architect a system, understand tradeoffs, balance customer/user requirements with business needs, set up proper testing and releases, properly document everything, etc.

LED? Luxury! 😁

I had one board with an improperly loaded power supply and I could tell what it was doing by the pattern and pitch of the squeal.

It did have a debug UART though, but I did come to find the sound pretty useful too!

Magit is fantastic!!

Very cool! Looks like the paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17033

Check out ForgeFed which is built on ActivityPub.

Forgejo is implementing support but I don’t know how far along it is.

Emacs!

With LSPs it works for just about anything and Magit is simply too good.

And he’ll just come back as a BT to ominously hover over the team.

I have several web services built in Rust, along with CLI tools, and a desktop GUI app. I’ve also player with a little bit of Rust in an embedded context and started on a phone app. Not many languages can boast a similar development experience across such diverse use cases, so universal doesn’t seem like much hyperbole.

Then some jerk runs rustfmt and ruins all your hard work!