connections-tui VS dotfiles

NYT Connections definitely has less red herrings than Only Connect's wall (and doesn't have the pressure of the timer, either...), but the quality has gone up significantly in the past year and half.

If anyone wants to try, I actually built a command line player of the NYT Connections game here: https://github.com/jleclanche/connections-tui (for some definition of the word "I")

https://xkcd.com/1319/

I think there will be a lot of this going on for the first few years, till everyone remembers this:

https://xkcd.com/1205/

> Automation takes a lot of manual labour

That's a great quote.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

I posted it recently, but now this works differently https://xkcd.com/1205/

You can get a throw away app in 5 mins, before I wouldn't even bother.

exactly. I can think of at least 5 different projects I have been on where a better allocator would made a world of difference. I can also think of another 5 where it probably would have been a waste of time to even fiddle with.

but as usual there is an xkcd for that. https://xkcd.com/1205/

One project I spent a bunch of time optimizing the write path of I/O. It was just using standard fwrite. But by staging items correctly it was an easy 10x speed win. Those optimizations sometimes stack up and count big. But it also had a few edges on it, so use with care.

https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth the time matrix)

LLM's change the calculus of the above chart dramatically.

On an unrelated note, AI completely changed economics of https://xkcd.com/1205/

Previously I'd postpone some tooling since I'd lost more time on it (unless it's something I wanted to learn anyway), but now I'm all in.

> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.

There are plenty of products now that only exist because of what it did deliver on. Any one who spends time in the niche communities where it is thriving can see that... On the low end look at Apollo automation, the story of Grismo Knives, at the high end look a Hadrian Manufacturing.

Vibe coding is a terrible name, but what a skilled dev can do with a deeply integrated AI coding assistant is amazing. It changes the calculus of "Is it worth your time" (see: https://xkcd.com/1205/ ).

Is it helpful in my day to day: it sure is. Is it far more helpful in doing all the things that have been on the back burner for YEARS? My gods yes! But none of that is matching the hype thats out there around "vibe coding".

In my experience, it's the old time-invested vs time-saved trade off. If you're not looking at these reams of output often enough, the incentive to figure out all the flags and configs for verbosity to write these script is lower: https://xkcd.com/1205/

And because these issues are often sporadic, doing all this would be an unwanted sidequest, so humans grit their teeth and wade through the garbage manually each time.

With LLMs, the cost is effectively 0 compared to a human, so it doesn't matter. Have them write the script. In fact, because it benefits the LLM by reducing context pollution, which increases their accuracy, such measures should be actively identified and put in place.

Absolutely, as per the xkcd automation chart, you'll break even if you save yourself those 5 minutes of work even just once a month over 5 years.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

Dead wrong.

Because the world is still filled with problems that would once have been on the wrong side of the is it worth your time matrix ( https://xkcd.com/1205/ )

There are all sorts of things that I, personally, should have automated long ago that I threw at claud to do for me. What was the cost to me? Prompt and a code review.

Meanwhile, on larger tasks an LLM deeply integrated into my IDE has been a boon. Having an internal debate on how to solve a problem, try both, write a test, prove out what is going to be better. Pair program, function by function with your LLM, treat it like a jr dev who can type faster than you if you give it clear instructions. I think you will be shocked at how quickly you can massively scale up your productivity.