I wrote this in June, and I'm honestly not sure I've felt the same magic since:
I was close to maxing out my $200 plan for the week, almost all Fable use [Claude CLI].
My observations:
Fable seemed to have bigger-picture thinking and completed tasks more thoroughly vs just focusing on executing the ask. It pieced together context and intent like an all-star employee would, vs one that just does what you say. Not overeager (important!), but if the above-and-beyond was warranted, it just did it. This was surprisingly delightful.
Coderabbit seemed to find ~1/3 or so as many issues when reviewing, too.
I have severe sleep apnea as well as insomnia. I may also be a multi-phasic sleeper. In any case my average sleep per night is ~3.5 hours with only ~1.5 hours of deep sleep. I use light therapy, CPAP, medications, etc but none of it solves my problems. I started taking creatine daily a couple of months ago. I've noticed a significant uptick in my cognitive abilities, despite being constantly sleep deprived. TFA doesn't touch on this apparent benefit of creatine, so thought I'd mention it for others who might be suffering from similar sleep issues.
Apnea sufferer here, for whom cpap stopped working after weight loss. It turned out that my mouth was opening during sleep, reducing the effectiveness of cpap, and after adding a chin strap to keep my mouth shut I have had very few apnea events.
The mouth-tapers aren’t always wrong (though we do always look silly).
For sleep apnea you may look into playing the didgeridoo for 30 minutes a day. The circular breathing every day really improve people's symptoms, and I've heard you see results after a few weeks or months. I'm in the middle of trying this but unfortunately I just haven't been doing it every day.
I've also heard just practicing circular breathing by blowing through a straw into a cup of water can produce the same effect but playing a didge is just so much cooler.
I haven't read into it much but I believe the circular breathing excercises strengthen some of the muscles that tend to relax during sleep so they keep your airway open.
Last year, I was severely sleep deprived, but needed to focus. On a whim, I took 25 grams of micronized creatine and it removed the issue with the dampened cognitive abilities. It just worked. It's nothing I would recommend as a long-term solution to sleep problems, but as a possible solution in a pinch, it could work.
Just a word of caution, 25g has a very strong chance of causing intense bloating. I'm part of multiple athletic teams, and the general consensus is that more than 10g is generally "uncomfortable" for its bloat pressure effects.
FYI, your sleep hygiene sounds good, but doctors have started to agree that primary, idiopathic insomnia doesn’t exist. It’s either anxiety or evidence of some severe disease or physiological condition.
So as long as you’re trying things, CBT is the most evidence-based long-term solution for the (very likely) cause of your insomnia.
Not to suggest diagnosis on the internet to people I haven't met, but for me chronic insomnia was actually narcolepsy. Ironic given that it's disease known for excess sleep, but the actual core issue is broken sleep structure. I had actually been supplementing with creatine for the past 6 months or so and recently gave it up. If it was having any effect it was marginal at best. The only thing that works is pharmaceuticals.
Thanks for sharing, that is very interesting. The article quoted several of the studies as saying that the benefits of creatine are mostly on "stressed" population. Maybe that's what's going on here?
It might have some kind of neuroprotective effect. For people who are already very healthy, there may be no measurable difference. But for the rest of us, it may be more helpful.
I'm reminded of something I read about dual n-back. (I forget where, it might have been Gwern page on it.) Someone said that when they are sleep deprived, they feel totally fine, but their n-back score absolutely tanks.
It might be interesting to test that, the intersection of sleep deprivation, creatine and objective measures of executive function. That could give us more data on the "helps most in stressed cases" theory.
After we get through this slop phase, I think software engineering won’t be about code at all, if it even exists as a profession. Feels like the beginning of the end for the craft.
No way. It's simply another layer of abstraction. You don't code in binary, or assembly, or C, or vanilla JavaScript anymore.
Eventually "coding" will simply be prompting skill with the wisdom of architectural decisions.
That's also one way to describe what it's like to code with React et al these days, anyway. Component/hook selection skill with the wisdom of architectural decisions.
People code in assembly and c and vanilla JavaScript all the time. You may not, but none of those are even that niche of skills. I’ve even decoded machine code from binary (well hexadecimal, but a raw memory dump) by hand a few times when I didn’t have a disassembler handy. Layers of abstraction don’t prevent the need to understand the layer below, they just reduce the number of times it is necessary, which may allow delegating that knowledge to a smaller pool of people.
Assembly doesn’t exactly map to in 1:1. x86’s mov eax, ebx is the classic example that has two ways of being encoded. Not to mention sections, labels and all the other fancies.
I have the opposite feeling; I am liking Rust more and more and thinking most of the world's C code should be rewritten. It seems like a sweet spot of enforced memory safety, performance, and human/agent readability.
I think Rust is annoyingly complex and badly designed (although it has good parts) and this would be the same mistake as past pushs to move projects to C++ because "object orientation is clearly better", and as such also step towards more complexity that is difficult to undo again and therefor actively harmful. The better and more powerful approach to safety is proving correctness, which is already possible today but we lack good opensource tooling. Proofs can be added to existing code without introducing complexity.
Rust and C++'s overcomplex syntax are a nightmare to maintain and set.
Go should have been the C succesor long ago, at least for 64 bit machines.
In the end It's from the same people of Unix/C/Plan9, so they know their
flaws and reasons.
For C++ like performance, sadly there's nothing close to Rust, but Zig and Nim can be close
and good enough. Inb4 "mah objects", just use Java or C# and forget C++ forever for
OOP programming. The sooner, the better.
If you like using C++ just as an improved C and hate templates and
objects, just use it for QT5/6 and some performing games and applications.
Go can handle the rest just fine.
What I'd love is to see projects like Cataclysm DDA:Bright Nights rewritten in Go, they could save tons of issues on compiling (Clang 11 here, a nightmware to compile) and running, because for an open world game
using the GC would free tons of waste on references and objects ingame.
Also it will compile much faster and it could be ported to most platforms
with no efforts at all.
And I say this as an ScummVM user and sometimes I like debugging some old adventure and RPG games under it...
Memory bugs are unknown unknowns that AI may or may not catch. There's net-present-value in switching to a language where certain types of memory bugs are impossible.
On the contrary, AI agents are doing an outstanding job of catching and fixing them. The jury's still out on the cost-to-value ratio of improving existing code vs. rewriting it.
I think Rust (the compiler / borrow checker) kinda finds bugs for you, some of which C/C++ does not.
In that sense, rewriting some code in Rust _may_ be cheaper than fixing the existing code. It may also be more welcoming to newer devs, since Rust can be easier to reason about, which is a long-term investment.
The borrow checker also helps with AI (as long as you don't let the AI use `unsafe`, or completely control what primitives in your codebase are allowed to use unsafe and never vibe-code any of it) — at least, the agent can't stop until `cargo build` passes.
I've also had better experience locally building applications in Rust than in C/C++. `cd ripgrep; cargo install --path .` or `cargo install ripgrep` usually just work, while `make` is usually painful.
I guess ask the bun people why they translated from zig to rust. I think it was essentially because rust guarantees a set of bugs can't exist so over medium to long term timeframes you end up with less technical debt.
Because making segfaults impossible is simply a better solution to playing a game of whack a mole of "crash, root cause, fix and add test for that very specific bug"?
“Boko” is actually a loanword from “book” so it literally means they want to forbid “book-learning”.
It is also instructive to understand that the Quran calls Jews and Christians “People of the Book”, in other words, people who read and believe the Bible.
Whenever I see Vimeo in a headline, it reminds me of my lack of foresight. In college, the creator of Vimeo was in my friend group. I went to his on-campus apartment to pick him up for a party once. He showed me this "video sharing website" that he was working on. Its title was an anagram of "movie." This was in 1999. Digitized video was barely a thing. I looked at it, didn't understand how it would be useful, and assumed it was another one of his eccentric creative outlets that would go nowhere. A few years later, he was a multimillionaire and I was not.
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