When I let my kids have freedom in the various stores we go into, I get nearly instant looks of disgust from people. It's like everybody has forgotten what it's like to be a kid and why that kind of independence is necessary. Socially it's verboten.
This is interesting. I've been away from the high-code world for a while and instead of going back to Java, I might try out c#. Thanks for the writeup.
I remember talking about this with a friend a long time ago. Basically, you'd write up tests and there was a magic engine that would generate code that would self-assemble and pass tests. There was no guarantee that the code would look good or be efficient--just that it passed the tests.
We had no clue that this could actually happen one day in the form of gen AI. I want to agree with you just to prove that I was right!
This is going to bring up a huge issue though: nailing requirements. Because of the nature of this, you're going to have to spec out everything in great detail to avoid edge cases. At that point, will the juice be worth the squeeze? Maybe. It feels like good businesses are thorough with those kinds of requirements.
How would you handle production incidents in such a codebase? The primary focus of a software engineer is to make the codebase easy (or at least possible) to understand. To tame complexity while achieving some business objectives. If we're going to just throw that part out the window you need to have a plan for how to operate the resultant mess
in production.
This is random, but if you're ever in the Corning area, do check out the Corning Museum of Glass. They did a really great job of blending an experience of history, art, creation, and science in there. The history of glass areas in particular made me really emotional seeing art expressed in this way. The fact that something so old was made it this far through time.
This is even more random, but Harvard's Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants is my single favorite natural history collection anywhere in the world. It alone is worth a trip to Cambridge!
It's incredible to a layperson, and if you've ever done any glass working whatsoever you'll be moved close to tears.
These guys are something else. I remember seeing them on Scooby Doo when I was a kid growing up. Their Vegas show is great. I’ve seen several magic shows and specials on TV, but the way they ran the whole thing and let you inspect the stage was super cool.
I've been away from the Java world for the past 4 years, and I really miss it. I hope I can get back to it soon.
This is cool: https://openjdk.org/jeps/512 (JEP 512: Compact Source Files and Instance Main Methods). It will allow beginners to progressively ease into the language and remove arbitrary gatekeeping from the language itself.
I also went down the rabbit hole on the Shenandoah GC JEP and learned that it was actually named after the Shenandoah Valley. Super cool.
Naive question: is using Claude Code from the command line or in these tools like VSC or Zed different from using it in the native app on a desktop? Is that because it has access to your codebase?
After having troubles with Claude desktop not properly updating canvas document, I found that apparently Claude Code is same as desktop one plus you can use it not just for code but documents in VS Code.
In Elixir/Rails (and newly React) world you can connect Clade Desktop to Tidewave, which gives you pretty close integration with codebase and CLI tools. That makes the experience somewhat similar to running Claude Code in editor's terminal, or now directly connected in Zed.
I think basically all these tools are trying to integrate all the stuff together and find the best way to do that, so that you don't need to be copy-pasting stuff around, jumping between tools, etc.
Not tried with Zed yet, but in VS Code it's mostly the same except you can view the diffs in the editor, and can give context from the open file. I think it can also see errors from the editor.
