Hey friends,

Spring just showed up suddenly this year. Winter what? Winter who? 🌞🌱😎

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

A few... months ago (geez, where does the time go?) I wrote about about testing AI.

So far, while working in my normal areas of expertise I often forgot Claude was there. Still, when moving into areas of less confidence (specifically working in a Python web app), Claude became useful in filling a few gaps:

• Finding the correct methods, functions, or patterns to get a solution rolling.
  • Claude became a sort of Stack Overflow++, I'd ask it some questions about a pattern, and it would explain it to me and show me how to adapt it. It was much easier to verify from a starting point than crawling through a whole documentation set.
• Helping write tests.
  • There's a lot of boilerplate code in tests, and I often know WHAT I want to test. Claude's done some decent work creating some basic tests and speeding up that part of development.
• Trouble-shooting small, isolated problems.
  • Linters are great at catching some of the silly mistakes, but having Claude bounce back an area of troublesome code felt like getting another perspective. There was one occasion when something Claude said made me realize something I had previously missed.

So we're off to an optimistic start, but I feel there are some longer-term issues to look out for. I still need to poke Claude occasionally and verify what it's sending me. There's a sort of 'slipperiness' to the answers where sometimes it's spot-on, and other times it's SORT OF correct. This feels riskier when I'm outside of my expertise area and can't definitively say by myself whether something is accurate.

Let the testing continue!

Interesting Web Bits 🍿

Web stuff:

• My brain has been stuck on ECS since Tony Bradley's talk last week. Maxwell Forbes has a neat guide on how he created a minimal ECS in TypeScript.
• I love crazy bug stories.
• Julia Evans is working on including JavaScript without traditional build tools. I'm partial to her #2 approach.
• A love letter to the CSV format.
• Another story of how individual productivity metrics often fail.
• A friendly a11y reminder that if you implement fluid type, users must still be able to increase the font by 200%.
• Mild title bait, but Jim Nielson is experimenting with changing UI states out for tiny HTML pages with View Transitions.

Other stuff:

• A lovely story about a canoe trip 43 years in the making.
• Victor Poughon tried to make artificial sunlight.
• Fish Doorbell! 🚪🛎️🐟