the padded cell

28 August, 2025

Does the word change the "quick fix?"

hack/jugaad vs kludge/bodge

I’m in Bengaluru to attend a friend’s wedding, and it has been fascinating walking around and seeing “the creative ways” of cable management, and my perspective from Singapore and Sweden is definitely to question the safety and longevity.

Coils of cables, some without the protective coating, all just lying around. What looks like some fiber cables for good measure.

Coils of cables, some without the protective coating, all just lying around. What looks like some fiber cables for good measure.

[… more]
crumb • • 3 min read • #thinking-out-loud, #engineering-culture

Justin Searls asks which of your colleagues are screwed?

I’ve been writing about how AI is likely to affect white-collar (or no-collar or hoodie-wearing) computer programmers […] Think about a random colleague you don’t feel particularly strongly about as you read the following pithy and reductive bullet points. […] They’re going to be screwed if they exhibit:

  • Curiosity without skepticism
  • Strategy without experiments
  • Ability without understanding
  • Productivity without urgency
  • Creativity without taste
  • Certainty without evidence

I recently said that I think curiosity is what makes a good software engineer, and gave examples of when/how they should be curious, but never pointed out that it has to come with a balancing function.

I can’t think of anything done 100% full-throttle that isn’t detrimental without something to balance it, but it’s tacit and not something I often think about immediately. For example, if you live your life 100% in service it will be limiting, a bit of selfishness is required, see Doug Forcett from The Good Place.

link • • #genie, #engineering-culture

26 August, 2025

Kent Beck has a subscriber post called return of Multi-tasking? where he’s realizing he’s more often working on different things across a day now that he’s working with genies. Less time doing clackety-click and more time thinking about next steps (or napping for epiphanies).

I’ve noticed the same pattern, this “productive multi-tasking” where you shift to something else when you’re stuck or “cogitating in the background.” Whether it’s waiting for feedback, getting help from the CI team (why won’t their plugin inject the AWS credentials it’s supposed to?), or just running out of brain juice and needing to let things percolate (which I want to remember Slow Productivity also recommends, especially for more nebulous work).

link • • #genie, #kent-beck, #productivity

…because someone said in a meeting to use the lemons to make lemonade and this started shouting in my mind

link • • #funny

24 August, 2025

Reasonable assumptions

…and why they're (nearly) impossible

As I was writing up angry at the genie, about getting frustrated at a bot for not having my context, I realized I’d done the same thing to a human colleague just months earlier.

A new colleague has been speed-running five years of my accumulated context, and I was getting really annoyed at all their questions. Why weren’t they making any reasonable assumptions? They’re a human after all, with decades of experience. In hindsight, I think that’s exactly why they’re not assuming and instead clarifying.

[… more]
crumb • • 5 min read • #thinking-out-loud, #engineering-culture

Angry at the genie

…getting exactly what I wished for, eventually

A colleague mentioned he’d like a genie coach to practice first principles thinking, because we had talked about the cooking coach I made and have been using. So I decided to give it a try, whipped up a prompt, and gave it a spin.

I had a problem I’d been working on and wanted to see if there was another way of thinking about it. I also asked it to add behavioral economics as an angle because I’ve been interested in pulling in a more human angle to my thinking (still learning what that means).

[… more]
crumb • • 4 min read • #thinking-out-loud, #genie, #learning

21 August, 2025

What makes a good software engineer?

“this is what would change my mind”

I was in an AMA at work, and someone asked me what makes a good software engineer. I said: Someone who is curious and wants to understand why from many points of view (tech, product, customer, etc.), and someone who cares about the outcome, not that they were the ones to “get it” or “make the decision.”

The more I think about it, the more I realize that curiosity is the foundation. You need curiosity about the system you’re building, the organization’s actual goals, and especially about the people you’re working with. But curiosity alone isn’t enough, you also need to be intellectually honest about what you find.

The principle I try to live by is: I would rather be correct than right.

[… more]
blog • • 9 min read • #thinking-out-loud, #engineering-culture

20 August, 2025

gum simplifies making shell scripts interactive: no more wrestling with read commands and ANSI escape codes for user input: just proper text editing, defaults, and clean UI.

Their demo: gum gemo

For example, if you run:

gum input --width 50 --header "Favorite author?" \
 --value "Terry Pratchett"

It will give you a question with a sensible default that you can then change as you want, and what you wrote as you hit enter will be returned so your script can then use it.

If you instead has some options where you want to select one:

gum choose --header "Favorite book?" \
 "Hogfather" "Thief of Time" "The Night Watch" "Small Gods"

Which gives you a selection box, you can configure to allow multiple selections, and the one you pick is then returned.

And one I really love, have it show a spinner to indicate that yes… something is still going on:

gum spin --title="Counting down from 10" sleep 10

Built on bubbletea, a Go TUI framework, use that directly if you need these components in Go code rather than shell scripts.

til • • #shell-scripting, #gum, #golang

15 August, 2025

DIKW pyramid when working with genies

…classification of different types of understanding

Curtis shared the DIKW pyramid, that I hadn’t heard of, and said that he feels that the genies helps him process the first two layers much more quickly than he can alone, that it can somewhat help penetrate into knowledge but not much. Which allows him to spend less time in D/I (collection) and then more to then K/W (processing?)

The pyramid of knowledge with a base of data, the next layer built of information, then knowledge and finally wisdom at the peak.

[… more]
crumb • • 4 min read • #thinking-out-loud, #genie, #learning

If you start a non-interactive bash shell it will source the content of the file defined in BASH_ENV (and ENV for a POSIX shell).

When bash is started non-interactively, to run a shell script, for example, it looks for the variable BASH_ENV in the environment, expands its value if it appears there, and uses the expanded value as the name of a file to read and execute. Bash behaves as if the following command were executed:

if [ -n "$BASH_ENV" ]; then . "$BASH_ENV"; fi

but the value of the PATH variable is not used to search for the file name.

til • • #shell-scripting

The YAML anchors to name a reusable section are defined by &name and then to use them to replace the value of something you do *name, if you want to “unsplat”/merge a dictionary/object then use <<: *name and then it’ll insert it at that point.

world: &world World
example: &example-anchor
  HELLO: *world
  There: Yo

my-values:
  <<: *example-anchor
  foo: bar

becomes

---
example:
  HELLO: World
  There: Yo
my-values:
  HELLO: World
  There: Yo
  foo: bar
til • • #yaml

YAML does not support unsplatting lists (basically, merging list items inline like you can with objects) and that’s intentional.

So if you have a document like below, there is no syntax to make the commands a three item list:

---
example: &example
  - "Hello"
  - "World!"

name: "hello"
commands:
  - << *example
  - "Oho!"

WILL NOT turn into:

---
example: &example
  - "Hello"
  - "World!"

name: "hello"
commands:
  - "Hello"
  - "World!"
  - "Oho!"

…and just because before I found the issue where it was described that this isn’t happening I had made a test repo to try and understand if it was a library/usage issue, because I noticed I could get things running on CI with << *example which syntax didn’t give syntax error, but also did nothing when running on Drone CI.

til • • #yaml

13 August, 2025

Commands with commas: I came across this a couple of years ago, and I’ve been using it for my new scripts since.

Debian today supports a huge number of commands; my modest Ubuntu laptop shows several thousand available:

$ apt-file search -x ‘^/usr/bin/[^/]*$’ | wc -l
21733

The solution was obviously to adjust my command names in such a way that they were still easy to type, but would never be chosen as system command names.
[…]

There was but one character left: the simple, modest comma.

A quick experiment revealed in a flash that the comma was exactly the character that I had been looking for! Every tool and shell that lay in arm’s reach treated the comma as a perfectly normal and unobjectionable character in a filename.[…]

And, best of all, thanks to the magic of tab-completion, it became very easy to browse my entire collection of commands. […]
I simply type a comma followed by tab and my list of commands appears

link • • #shell-scripting, #productivity

/usr/bin/env executes commands with flags/subcommands, not just bare executables. Which is great if you, for example, have a script/lint that’s a Python script, and it needs dependencies from a virtualenv that isn’t active when you call it.

Just put your shebang as /usr/bin/env uv run python3 and it always runs in the virtualenv, no wrapper script needed. This feels obvious in hindsight, it’s what you expect from these tools 😃

til • • #shell-scripting

12 August, 2025

Anthropic on prompting for agents

…and musing on genies possibly teaching empathy

Anthropic has released some recordings from their Code w/ Claude event in May and the Prompting for Agents presentation’s “key principles” are basically to empathise with your agent, imagine it’s a brilliant new grad, book smart but missing all things practical at their first job: You need clear concepts, unambiguous instructions, and well-named and designed tools.

I’m more than a little amused that we’re basically coming to a point where, if things pan out with the genies, then the best wranglers will be the ones that can empathise the most with others. Then again, I always thought the brilliant asshole was the exception, they only survive if they’re in charge or are legacy to the company. And sitting in on the review meetings at work… it’s definitely the ones that help the team that we like the most, even if we sometimes need to push them to have their name on something so people don’t overlook them.

[… more]
crumb • • 3 min read • #genie, #mentoring, #context-engineering, #kent-beck

10 August, 2025

Simon Sinek on AI and the value of struggle, via Arjit:

People keep telling us life is not about the destination. Life is about the journey. But when we think about AI, we only think about the destination. And it’s remarkable ability to write the book, paint the painting, solve the problem, but we forget the importance of doing the work yourself.

And I think in our modern day and age, we have underrepresented the value of struggle. I am smarter, better at problem solving, more resourceful, not because a book exists with my ideas in it, but because I wrote it. That excruciating journey is what made me grow.

But it’s the same for love, friendships, conflict. And I think that we forget that we give up certain skills or abilities because of technology.

The struggle is the point. More people can generate a mediocre painting or write perfect English now, but they won’t understand the beauty behind either without doing the work. And it’s our prerogative to decide which struggles matter to us or if we just wanted something nice to hang in the toilet.

link • • #ai, #genie, #learning

Went looking for that old ‘kids today don’t memorize’ quote and found an old argument against writing:

[…] They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. […]

One thing we’re not doing as effectively today as we’ve done in the past is to learn lessons by heart. If you don’t know things with perfect recall, how can you expect to apply them?

Socrates goes on to compare a written text to a painting:

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.

That last bit especially, “if you ask them anything… they go on telling just the same thing forever.” This all sounds exactly like how we’re talking about genies today, and… we’re probably going to be fine.

link • • #genie, #learning

When everyone gets a genie

learning to handle expertise you didn't earn

We’ve always had to figure out who to trust for expertise, but until now, that access wasn’t universal. Used to be the bloke at the pub who ‘knew things,’ or that friend of a friend who could fix computers (me as a kid), or books if you had the patience. Rich people had their ‘real’ experts on call, though Bernie Madoff shows how well that could work out.

The internet changed things, sure. Suddenly you could reach out to actual experts, find communities, and learn from people across the world. But you still needed judgment, because you could also find a community that agreed the earth was flat, so, you know, mixed bag.

What hasn’t changed is we’ve always had to figure out who to trust. What’s changing is how we get our answers, and who gets to sound like an expert.

[… more]
blog • • 10 min read • #thinking-out-loud, #ai, #genie, #learning

02 August, 2025

Drone CI has special handling for ${VAR} and will replace it itself instead of letting the shell do it. So if you have export PATH=${GOPATH}/bin:$PATH and have $GOPATH defined in your global environment key, then it’ll become a blank value. But if you do export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$PATH it’ll work. You can escape by adding an extra dollar sign, i.e. $${VAR} will be evaluated by the shell.

This is different from normal shell where ${VAR} is the same as $VAR and it exists to make sure you can concatenate strings without issues, i.e.

VAR=m000
echo "'${VAR}est'"  # => 'm000est'
echo "'$VARest'"    # => ''
til • • Updated • #drone-ci

Drone CI will not smartly skip subsequent steps if you have a when on the very first step in a depends_on chain, so you have to repeat the when condition for each step because it doesn’t realize that the first dependency is gone.

til • • #drone-ci