I give Claude small incremental tasks to do and it usually does them flawlessly. I know how to design the software and break into incremental tasks. Claude does the work. The productivity increase has been incredible. I think I'll be able to bootstrap a single person lifestyle business just using Claude.

When my child was an infant, my wife parked in a parking lot and starting chatting with a friend about 10 yards away. Minutes later a woman came by and starting claiming the child was not safe and was going to call protective services. This freaked both of us out that a stranger could potentially have the power to cause the government to become involved with our family. Fortunately, we didn't let that experience prevent us from letting our kids wander freely. But it does just take one over-concerned parent, to get you into trouble.

A friend of mine was outside with his kids. He read a book and a woman who drove by yelled at him to always watch the kids and not read a book.

I had something like that happen I was out of town and forgot most places in America have a way more fascist child snatchers than where I live. The police contacted a national database check, their local child services, and my hometown child services. Thankfully my hometown child services told them to go fuck themselves (the place I live in now thankfully doesn't usually get involved unless there is serious abuse) and the ones in the place I was at didn't have time to deal with it before I left, but they certainly would have if I were a resident there.

> fascist child snatchers

lol

I used to live near a busy street. I eventually got used to the noise but when I bought my house I made sure to find a quiet spot. Now, its dead quiet at night and the difference in my quality of life is significant. I also made the city put shades on the street lights so they wouldn't shine on my house. Another huge improvement.

Peace is the dream, which is being slowly killed. People who value peace are being pushed farther and farther out. You used to be able to find peace in neighborhoods, but more and more people have to choose between community and peace.

I never thought they were dumb once I saw that they could power a car with their feet.

(flinstones reference, for our younger readers)

My grandfather fell down, broke his leg and then died in the hospital.

Four people in my family drive my car. I'm supposed to track that? sure.

The standard for this in the UK is that you should make a reasonable effort to work out who was driving.

e.g. checking your calendar/diary, looking through receipts or bank statements to work out where you likely were.

There's also a requirement that a request for information is sent within 14 days for minor incidents like speeding or red light violations, so it's not like you have to work out who was driving on a Tuesday morning three years ago.

That’s not how it works in the United States. I was driving my (female) partner’s car and received a citation. I gave the cop my license but he pulled the owner’s (my female partner) driving record using her vehicle’s license plate (is what I’m guessing happened) and issued her the citation instead of me. I was very excited since this meant I was going to get away without a citation.

I gave her the citation and she called the cop who issued the citation and asked him who was driving at the time. He answered that a man was driving, and she told him he issued the citation to her, a woman. Her first name is one letter away from a male first name, so I’m guessing the cop saw it and assumed it was me and not her.

He got frustrated and told her to go ahead and rip the citation up since he wrote it to the wrong driver, she told him she’d show up to court and the judge would instantly dismiss the ticket due to the officer pulling over a man and issuing the citation to a woman, so he canceled it. He didn’t want to look like a complete fool in front of a judge.

Not once did he ask who was actually driving because he knows she is never going to tell him and he can’t force her to reveal that it was me.

Why not just drive under the speed limit and sober instead of giggling about avoiding penalties while endangering us all?

Note that not once did you mention that you were innocent.

> and sober

Why would you presume GP was drunk?

Also, it's completely common and safe to drive slightly over the speed limit in some circumstances, and in many parts of the US it's exceedingly rare for people to drive below the speed limit as you suggest. In many places the tickets are essentially written more for not seeing the cop and slowing down than for actually doing 78 in a 65.

I was not drunk, I haven’t had a drink in over 10 years and I’ve never driven drunk.

I did not say I was innocent of the violation because I was not innocent, I never claimed to be.

Exactly, that's why I'm saying, why are you cheering about getting off on a technicality?

Because I didn’t have to pay a fine and my insurance rates didn’t go up. If you’re trying to make me feel guilty, it’s not going to work.

I know you'd like it to work that way, but it doesn't in most jurisdictions in the US.

Does the car get points on its record?

This is exactly how it works in plenty of countries, actually! The US is the outlier here. In practice people have zero trouble figuring out which family member was driving - just like they have no trouble getting a kid to fess up to scratching the bumper while backing up into their own garage.

The burden is on you to explain why the US should do things the way other countries do. What's better for everyone about that? Why should we change our notion of justice to make you feel better about it?

> The burden is on you to explain why the US should do things the way other countries do. What's better for everyone about that?

In short: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/19...

What proportion of road deaths are due to people running red lights versus just driving too fast for conditions, or being impaired at the wheel, or any number of things that these cameras don't enforce?

they grow in my yard without any effort.

I haven't worked in a codebase in 20 years that didn't have some sort of tests.

Out of interest, what language ecosystems do you tend to work in?

My guess is that some languages - like Go - have a more robust testing culture than other languages like PHP.

Not who you asked but I think it comes down to risk/reward. The consequences of some user finding a big in most websites is low, compared to the risk of an astronaut finding a bug the hard way whilst attempting re-entry.

There is genuinely a reasonable and rational argument to “testing requires more effort than fixing the issues as users find them” if the consequences are low. See video games being notorious for this.

So, industry is more important than language I’d say.

I don't see testing as a quality thing any more, I see it as a developer productivity thing.

If my project has tests I can work so much faster on it, because I can confidently add tests and refactor and know that I didn't break existing functionality.

You gotta pay that initial cost to to get the framework in place though. That takes early discipline.

Depends again on the type of work, and it absolutely has something to do with quality. You’re caring about not breaking existing functionality, you’re refactoring, you’re moving forward with confidence in your code.

That’s absolutely a quality thing. I can assure you that you could move a lot faster if you didn’t try and meet such standards, not that it’d be a good idea necessarily, but in isolation it proves the point.

Developer testing is checking whether the code does what the developer themself thinks it should. QA testing is checking whether the code does what the customers / users / rest of the world thinks it should.

It’s a lot faster and easier than it used to be. Things like xUnit in the .net world make setting up tests friction free to the point where I question a codebase that doesn’t have some kind of basic unit tests. It doesn’t make mock testing or integration testing easier but I would argue if you know the base code and logic is sound those tests are less relevant.

One thing I found is that if testing is easy, your code structure does change a bit to aid with a “test first” approach and I don’t hate it. I thought it made me slower but it doesn’t, it ensures that when all the ground work is finished, the gnarly part of wiring everything up goes much faster.

Yeah I've found the same, having good test discipline influences my code design in a positive way because code that's easier to test is also code that's easier to integrate and understand.

Here's a real schedule: CEO: we need to launch x end of Q2 PM: Here are the four monthly milestones Engineer Mgr: Let's estimate the stories. Now put them into eight sprints Go!

Part of that I think is the culture and not the language. Personally I try to use the least powerful method that gets the job done and that usually keeps me unblocked. In practice that usually means using it as a better Java and not going down the functional monad path. I know scala has gone through a rough patch and maybe migrating from 2 to 3 is painful. But if you try starting a new project now with the latest Scala 3, I think you'll find that its pretty nice. Even IDE support is pretty good.