Code is not an asset – it's a liability. The longer a computer system has been running, the more tech debt it represents. The more important the system is, the harder it is to bring down and completely redo. Instead, new layers of code are slathered atop of it, and wherever the layers of code meet, there are fissures in which these systems behave in ways that don't exactly match up. Worse still: when two companies are merged, their seamed, fissured IT systems are smashed together, so that now there are adjacent sources of tech debt, as well as upstream and downstream cracks. […]
For if AI code – written at 10,000 times the speed of any human coder, designed to work well, but not to fail gracefully – is the digital asbestos we're filling our walls with, then our descendants will spend generations digging that asbestos out of the walls. There will be plenty of work fixing the things that we broke thanks to the most dangerous AI psychosis of all – the hallucinatory belief that "writing code" is the same thing as "software engineering." At the rate we're going, we'll have full employment for generations of asbestos removers.
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work by Simon Willison
A computer can never be held accountable. That's your job as the human in the loop.
Almost anyone can prompt an LLM to generate a thousand-line patch and submit it for code review. That's no longer valuable. What's valuable is contributing code that is proven to work.
I liked the way Simon said it - your job is to deliver code you have proven to work.
Oxide's internal tips on LLM use
As conversation length grows, each message gets more expensive while Claude gets dumber. That's a bad trade! Use /context and /cost or the statusline trick above to keep an eye on your context window. CC natively gives a percentage but it's sort of fake because it includes a large buffer of empty space to use for compacting.
Aligns with my experience. It’s better to start a new chat than trying to continue in the same chat hoping for a fix.
Also has a nice list of resources at the end.