This Statement Is False

AI coding assistants are brilliant. They're also overconfident, defensive, and will produce wrong fixes with total certainty while ignoring instructions you already gave them. If you've used one for serious work, you've felt this: you correct it, it explains why it was actually right. You point out it missed something, it does the same thing again. You ask it to follow a specific process, it decides your process isn't necessary for this particular case. And it's not about how you talk to it. I use the Socratic method with my AI. I ask questions, not to be polite, but because I want to see its reasoning without biasing it. "Can you look at this?" not "here's what's wrong." I want to know what it finds on its own. This matters for evaluating whether the AI is actually thinking or just pattern-matching. And it means when I asked default Claude whether it had loaded a skill, that was a Socratic nudge, not an accusation. The model treated it a...

You're iterating: you prompt your AI, it writes code, repeat. Things are going well... but then you make a change to one part of your app and something else quietly breaks. A feature you relied on isn't there. A UI element moved. A workflow you never touched now behaves differently. You didn't ask for any of that. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. It's not a bug: it's because AIs work by telling stories. They make stories that make sense as much as possible, so they fill in missing details automatically. If you don't supply them, the AI generates them. That's what makes AI-assisted coding so productive. But it's also what makes apps unstable across multiple changes. The problem: unanchored code However you work with your AI: vibe coding, specs and code, or whatever, it does its best to make minimal, targeted changes. And for simple, localized updates, that usually works fine. But because of how AI works, it can add  features you didn't a...

Claude Code can now help you track your job search. Job Tracker is a local-first Frictionless application: paste a job URL and Claude scrapes the details, searches for salary data, and keeps everything organized while you focus on landing the role. And if the app doesn't cover something you need, just ask Claude to add it; the app evolves with you as you use it. The Problem If you've ever job searched, you know the drill:  Copying company, title, and location from every listing into your notes Listings that don't show salary No idea where the company is even headquartered Dozens of applications across different sites "Wait, did I already apply to this company?" Status updates scattered across emails That perfect cover letter... somewhere on your desktop Spreadsheets work, but manually copying data from every listing is tedious. Job boards have trackers, but your data is siloed. And good luck finding salary ranges or company addresses when they're not in the p...

I've been tuning and refining ui-engine . Man, design choices early on dramatically affect the quality, capabilities, and potential responsiveness of a platform, especially if it has a UI. I've been using a lot of UI experience I've acquired since the 80s and tuning this platform is making me pull out some pretty weird heuristics, like "use a debounce," except in certain situations where that actually interferes with responsiveness. And, yep, I just scrutinized what Claude did and it's starting the debounce timer on the first send after processing a batch, so when processing a batch takes a lot of time, debounce will actually make responsiveness worse by adding yet more of a wait on top of that. Bad decision. My friend says Claude's a lazy coder. Claude does the easy thing if you just tell it, "build X". That's pretty much at every level throughout the system. Even a good design ends up with Claude cutting corners when it writes code becaus...