I've had a lot of bad experience with trying to use AIs to develop my codebase. My experiences so far had been full of failures. But this week I had a... sort-of successful time.

What I really discovered, though, is that is programming with an AI "assisstant" is like having a first-year, over-eager programming student from some alien world armed with a huge library of templates and a lot more time and energy to stitch them together. It's process for producing code isn't based on intent, so what you get is a template you're expected to modify.

The problem is, so many vibe-coders think they can code without understanding what the code does. The problem is, AIs don't understand what the code does either.

In my last adventure, I complained mightily about how a tiny bug in tree-sitter-scss was all that stood between me and my next heroic work accomplishment. Although I didn't mention it at the time, I had little faith that my submitted issue would be addressed anytime soon, since when looking at the tree-sitter grammar repository I could see that the SCSS parser had last been updated in early April of 2024 and had been idle for eight months.

I took matters into my own hands.

When you've got twenty years of developer experience, there is one source of frustration at work that can be greater than any other: when you can see the promised land but you know you can't get there and, worst of all, the wall between you and there is barely ankle high.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expert on parsers and scanners. I've written a few DSLs in my time and always leaned on something commonly available, usually either s-expressions, a readily available configuration language like YAML or TOML, or just a cut-down version of the host language with specificity for my DSL needs.

So let's talk about Shatterfly.

Since I'm looking for work, let me tell you what I look for in a project. I don't look too hard at the languages, platform, or libraries being used; I know the most important ones and can learn their relatives and competitors without too much effort.

What I want to know about a start-up is this: do you have a secret sauce, and do you know how long the schlep will be?

In software development, Agile is the most popular form of project organization and Jira by Atlassian is the most common tool used to keep track of that organization. But two different ideas from two very different places and times have convinced me that Agile is the primary cause of developer burnout.

I make it a habit to never respond directly on The Orange Site, but a recent post there caught my attention and I wanted to respond to the poor guy. He said that he was on his third startup since getting out of university, but he'd never worked at "a big company" and feared that he'd somehow made it to 30 (OMG!) without ever learning "the right way to do something."

There is no right way.