It said it had. Obviously, a fabrication. Even after it said it implemented it, it took a couple more hours of coaxing it and pointing whst should be done before it actually worked.

Point is, one shouldn’t go near these LLMs for coding unless they know what to do and how to look for problems.

Last week, curious what would be generated, told Cursor (with Claude Opus 4.5) to create an animated LED strip effect for an ESP32 device in C. Pretty simple stuff. It thinks for a long time. Creates a ton of scaffolding, docs, step-by-step agentic checklists, even a Makefile to build and deploy the binary. It then says: “Done.”

I go compile it. Lots of errors. I paste over the logs and ask it what’s wrong. Claude thinks for a while longer, then goes:

“I see the issue - I only created the header file but never completed the LED manager implementation. Let me check what’s there and finish the implementation.”

I want a Nio with battery-swap, and a hitch for the unicorn-trailer.

Paper books with nightlights, or ebooks on low light level.

Reduced sensory input works like a charm.

You had me at PwC.

/s

We had one of those jar opening hand-tools. It broke. This one hasn’t failed yet.

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That was fun! Great to dive down below the bit level and see what goes on there.

That I was NOT dropped headfirst at birth.

And I used to drift down with friends to that baker, and wait until sunrise until warm donuts were sold out of the back door.

Was a Yegge fan. Sad to say, looks like he’s lost his f’ing mind.

We got DESTROYED in pinewood derby one year when someone’s engineer dad carved the body into a smooth, irregularly shaped U, with contoured weights. He said he used CAD software, did wind-tunnel tests, and used a special CNC machine to shape it.

Most kids were happy the wheels stayed on.

My son’s science fair project was to measure how much water got used by taking showers vs baths, low-flow vs regular toilets, hand-washing vs dishwashers, etc. We had a pretty nasty drought in our state that year. He had plotted charts, calculated cost savings, learned how to use graphic software and printed color banners. Did it all himself.

The next aisle over, a couple of kids had counted the number of colors in a bag of jellybeans. They had hand-drawn a bar chart on a board with a sharpie. However, they also had a bowl full of jellybeans and you could take a handful if you stopped by. They made sure the bowl was kept full. There was a line out the door.

An important science lesson was learned that year.

I’ve been using these for constrained, boring development tasks since they first came out. “Pro” versions too. Like converting code from one language to another, or adding small features to existing code bases. Things I don’t really want to bother taking weeks to learn, when I know I’ll only be doing them once. They work fine if you take baby steps, make sure you do functional/integrated testing as you go (don’t trust their unit tests–they’re worthless), and review EVERYTHING generated. Also, make sure you have a good, working repo version you can always revert to.

Another good use is for starting boilerplate scaffolding (like, a web server with a login page, a basic web UI, or REST APIs). But the minute you go high-level, they just shit the bed.

The key point in that article is the “90%” one (in my experience it’s more like 75%). Taking a project from POC/tire-kicking/prototype to production is HARD. All the shortcuts you took to get to the end fast have to be re-done. Sometimes, you have to re-architect the whole thing to scale up to multiple users vs just a couple. There’s security, and realtime monitoring, and maybe compliance/regulatory things to worry about. That’s where these tools offer no help (or worse, hallucinate bad help).

Ultimately, there’s no substitute for battle-tested, scar-tissued, human experience.

Cries in word-processor ‘focused writing’ mode.

Still, pretty amazing they got full running video in one of the windows.

Wait, they still have 14,000 people working in that division. How is that ‘shutting down?’

I’m not a VR fan or customer, but these headlines are a bit much.

Important to wait 30 minutes after a meal before going swimming, or starting an art project.

If it wasn’t for all those compiler errors, rendering problems, and crashes, it would be perfect.