People keep asking me If I use Generative AI tools for coding and what I think of them, so this is my effort to put my thoughts in writing, so that I can send people here instead of having to repeat myself every time I get the question.

You should write more toy programs

Abstract page for arXiv paper 2506.08872: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

A Comprehensive Guide to The Story of Mel

One of the major turning points in my life was reading my dad’s copy of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as a teenager. […] But Cialdini’s book was a turning point because it highlighted the very real limitations to human reasoning. No matter how smart you were, the mechanisms of your thinkings could easily be tricked in ways that completely bypassed your logical thinking and could insert ideas and trigger decisions that were not in your best interest.

What happened on Test Flight 9?

The conversation isn’t over, but I don’t think I have much to add to it.

Interesting read that does not address the ethics of LLM training.

Automating things, even when it doesn’t save time, is how you learn the skills to automate the things that will.

An interesting paper that sheds light on the activity of developing and maintaining software.

So, it has come to this. My FreeBSD skills, disregard for Docker and distaste for LLMs made me too employable. Time to learn other basic

Quoting wikipedia: Several studies, performed later in other countries, attempting to replicate Zeigarnik’s experiment, failed to find any significant differences in recall between “finished” and “unfinished” (interrupted) tasks, for example Van Bergen (1968).

The OpenBSD kernel has a set of functions to help detect memory corruption, the poison subroutines. The memory management code uses these functions, but they themselves have a very simple interface, no complicated types or data structures, meaning they’re easy to replace. What if we rewrite the memory corruption detection functions in rust so it’s impossible for them to cause memory corruption?

Compulsory read for all anarchists.

Stating the obvious but enlightening all the same.

Rust is a lovely programming language but I’ve never quite come to terms with crates.io, or any other of these language-specific repositories where everyone …

Focus on where to find the relevant information instead of giving instructions.

Sums up my own thinking on the subject, although I’m leaning towards balancing 1 and 2.