Claude Code: Take 2
After more time pair-coding with Claude Code, the awe wears off. It's an overly eager junior with raw smarts and no taste — fast, useful for onboarding, but prone to ridiculous code that you'd reject from a new grad.
Archive
All of my posts.
Birthright Citizenship
From English jus soli through Dred Scott to Wong Kim Ark, gathering the historical context around Trump's executive order. The merits are less clear-cut than contemporary news suggests once you go back to the original sources.
Moving On [Meta]
Leaving Meta after a decade. The Facebook of the Red Culture Book — "What would you do if you were not afraid?" — is not the Meta of muscular energy and top-down NFT, Messaging Interop, and Metaverse. A goodbye, and a question worth carrying into the next chapter.
In Love of Desert
Spring in Phoenix, the Palo Verde trees in bloom, and the Leica Q2 finally clicking — small package, fast lens, physical dials that let you pre-set the shot before raising the camera.
Reflecting on AI Coding
Five days, ten thousand lines of Lua, no prior experience with the language. Claude Code is not auto-complete — it's a giant pattern-matching machine that needs grounding through tests and architecture. The 25x figure is cheeky, but the shift is real.
Claude Code
First real run with Claude Code: 500 lines of Lua changes from someone who hadn't written a line of it before. Not AGI, not a junior engineer replacement — a powerful, imprecise statistical machine that makes knowledge workers dramatically more effective.
Use ChatGPT to Learn and NeoVIM to Take Note
Introducing Parley.nvim: a Neovim plugin that turns chatting with an LLM into a living, editable transcript. Trees of follow-up questions, annotations, and context compaction via assistant-summarized lines — built collaboratively with Claude Code.
ChatGPT in NeoVIM
The stock ChatGPT app is awful for organizing long research threads. Running gp.nvim in Neovim instead — full transcript, freely editable, customizable syntax highlighting — turns a chat into the building blocks of a real research report.
WhatsApp Culture
Six years inside WhatsApp's improbably quiet Menlo Park building, where the motto was Keep It Simple and the F word was Focus; and where you hot-loaded code straight into production, no code review. It worked.
Astrophotography
Notes from the Death Valley Dark Sky Festival — amino acids in meteorites, planets around every star, and the practical limits of a Leica Q2 capped at 8 seconds of exposure when you really want twenty.