Homer's car is the perfect LLM-coding metaphor

The 3 Reasons Homer's car from "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" is the perfect metaphor for agentic LLM-coding

1: Homer doesn't know anything about making cars (no domain knowledge)

2: The R&D department of his brother's car company gives him the ability to do kinda anything within the limits of physics (like claude code supercharges me within the world of bits)

3: nobody ever pushes back on his dumb ideas!

My Ridiculous/Silly/Embarrassing/Sloppy Recent Projects

I am on a $100/month Claude plan. I've hit my limits, barely, each of the last two weeks.

Working like this is definitely a kind of mania. Tiring in a way you can't quite put your finger on, almost like spending the day playing some obscure sport that requires muscle groups you don't normally activate.

I am no longer coding to make anything lasting. I am now coding to explore ideas and to teach myself how to use these new tools.

Geoffrey Huntley (of the Ralph method) describes working this way as like throwing pottery. While I've never thrown a pot, that metaphor has been in my brain as I've worked, and I see my projects in this directory kind of like pots that I've made learning to practice a technique (none of them are particularly museum-quality or even symmetrical).

LLM hot takes

This blog post has no structure, and I apologize. Here are some hot takes:

RIP Python as super language

Until not that long ago Python was my best friend/favorite/ride or die.

It's virtues:

readability

friendliness to beginners

but also onramp into more high performance/specific stuff for scientists (who may be code novices)

Now, though...you're kidding yourself if you think new-to-code/novices people are not going to use LLMs like crazy. And personally typescript is my go-to LLM language for web compatibility + type safety + tooling. Is there even going to be a new lingua franca language for normies? I think that's an honest question, whether there will be one.

RIP (eventually) traditional open source

What does it mean to collaborate as a heavy agentic coder? More forking? "Have your agent talk to my agent"?

I don't know. I think a good start would be just more dialog (& that's a big part of why I'm writing/streaming/sharing these days). I would very much like to pair program with others who use LLMs differently than I do. Maybe have a conversation that we record and turn into a spec that then we both craft into software, and then compare notes? DMs are open.

Protocols matter more/can be superchargers

Specificity matters so much for prompting. "Make {my stupid app} compatible with the ATProto so users can upload {the stupid thing my stupid app lets them do} to their PDS and share if they like" is kind of an awesome hack for adding a lot of carefully vetted specific engineering secret sauce to your project.