Israr

Making machines intelligent.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

At this rate, I'll soon be re-enrolling in nursery just to learn how to hold a pen again. Years of typing have turned my handwriting into a doctor's prescription written during an earthquake.

Wrote a handwritten letter just now & honestly, even doctors would call it unreadable.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Plan mode in Claude Code/Codex is useful, but it is becoming the most overused button in agentic engineering. People reach for it before every feature, every refactor, every test, and every tiny UI change. The agent then spends 30 seconds planning a change that would take 10 seconds to just do.

The deeper problem is that plan mode is a one-time checkpoint for the current prompt. Engineering standards are not one-time. Auth rules, payment flows, migration patterns, testing conventions, observability expectations, design tokens, and component rules should not be re-explained in chat every time. They should live in files the agent can load.

Use AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md for rules that apply to every task. Use SKILL.md for feature-class knowledge: auth, payments, migrations, tests, observability, frontend design. Use plan mode for genuinely unclear or risky work: schema changes, security-sensitive paths, large refactors, or changes where the cost of being wrong is real.

A skill is simple: a folder with a SKILL.md file, plus optional scripts and references. It stays idle until the task matches, then gives the agent the context it needs. A SKILL.md is reusable infrastructure, and the plan mode is a sticky note you throw away after every task.

The 80% case is not "plan harder." It is "write the reusable context once."

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Something I'm noticing with Claude Code/Codex is that the productivity gain is highly uneven, and almost entirely depends on how clear your product vision is going in. "I want to build something like XYZ..." mostly produces slop. But if you have a concrete plan and execute it component by component, the throughput is genuinely ~10x. The model is doing the typing, you're doing the architecture.

The weirdest part is that it's addictive. Normally, writing software is slow meaning you have to debug, wait, search, fix, and repeat. With these tools, the gap between "I want this" and "it works" shrinks to minutes. Your brain starts treating it the way it treats games, with constant small wins, and you keep going.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Opus 4.7 was burning roughly 3x the tokens I used to spend on 4.6 before the upgrade. Sessions that comfortably fit inside one context window back in March were suddenly pushing me into the weekly cap by Wednesday.

That matters because for most developers, the real cost of these tools is not the advertised price per token. It is the cost per finished task.

And on that metric, Claude Code got meaningfully worse.

Then I ran the same kinds of tasks through Codex on GPT-5.5.

Same repo. Same tickets. Same style of prompts.

The result: roughly one quarter of the tokens, fewer loops, cleaner execution, and far less permission-seeking theatre.

No endless "shall I continue?"

No repeated searches pretending to be progress.

Just one pass, edits, tests, done.

The uncomfortable part is that the sticker price did not really change, but the cost per completed task absolutely did.

If a model uses more tokens for the same English text, loops more often, forgets constraints mid-session, and pushes Pro users into caps sooner, that is effectively a price increase.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Switching back to Codex from Claude Code is a breeze.

Opus 4.7 is worse than 4.6. It burns through tokens, gets stuck in loops on simple queries, and struggles to complete tasks efficiently. The context compression also ignores some key requirements later on.

The same queries on Codex ran efficiently without wasting time or tokens.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Baat tu achi hay.

PS. Yeh tum dono (you and @_Aimeme_) nay Whatsapp group khola hay? Pehlay aik compile karti hay aur phir forwarded as received karti ho on X? Uper neechay aik he chez dekhi on the TL with different handles. Dono like ho nahi saktein tu aik ko like aur aik ko comment.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

@theunfunnyone_ Too close to walk in, too lazy to even try. You're the Lazy League Champion. Proud of you!🏆

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

May 03, 2026 - New beginning.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Hyderabad in both Pakistan (PSL) and India (IPL) are doing great right now.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Grok's Arabic auto-translation turned '... May God honor them' into '... May God blacken their faces.' Flipped a compliment into a curse and didn't even flinch.

This is the AI pitched as the most reliable model by its own owner. 🙃

[ساره المالكي @dt7_9]

غزال 🦌 بيموت من العطش وسقوه،،
وبيض الله وجيههم.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

@Nadieous Celeb ho gai ho keh even after a year, you're getting traction...

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

@Nadieous Aik saal baad phir lazmi yaad karwana tha gulaab jamun kay sath hona wala yeh waqeya... Only Friday is the sweet day aur abhi bhi 4 din baki hain...

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Stop copy-pasting DESIGN.md files you don't understand.
Learn the WHY: design thinking before code, aesthetic constraints, what to avoid. Once it clicks, you won't even need the file.

A creative mind beats a borrowed template every time.

PS. "For you" tab is full of "Here is the only DESIGN.md file you need..." bs.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Pakistan sealed half of Islamabad to protect Trump's delegation. Trump couldn't even protect himself at his own dinner party. Maybe he should've asked Pakistan for security advice. 🇵🇰

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Nobody talks about Severance, The Lincoln Lawyer and Mayor of Kingstown enough. All three are absolutely elite television.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Pakistan's best PR agent in 2026 isn't #ISPR. It isn't the foreign ministry. It is Donald Trump.

"Pakistan is terrific. The Field Marshal is fantastic. The Prime Minister is great."

Hum abhi bhi decide nahi kar paye ke democracy achi hai ya dictatorship. Trump ne dono ko retweet kar diya.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Walls Cornetto. Walls Feast. Walls Paddle Pop. Flip any of them over. It says "frozen dessert", not ice cream. They replaced milk fat with palm oil. Can't legally call it ice cream, so they don't.

Aur phir bhi jab tum shop walay se achi ice cream maango, woh frozen-dessert pakra deta hai.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

Facebook hasn't changed one bit in the past 11 years; in fact, it's gotten worse.

The 50-plus uncles have completely taken over now. Every single morning, without fail, the subah bakhair post goes up. Rain, shine, personal tragedy, doesn't matter. The post goes up. It's more consistent than their prayers, honestly.

And that's just the opener. By the time you've had your chai, nine more posts have already flooded your feed. Cherry-picked golden words, a sher (poetic couplet) nobody asked for, then all of a sudden a Quranic verse or two, some "life advice" that was probably forwarded from a WhatsApp group.

Oh and every post has an image. Not a photo. Not something they took themselves. A jpeg with a quotation, a sher, a verse, or just random advice nobody asked for either.

Facebook is basically a public WhatsApp group for uncles now.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

@a4ambitious Phir main kuch kahon ga tu tum kid kaho ge...

Iss waqt duty koe nahi hay? Udhar patient mar rahay hain aur tum idhar mera record set karwa lo.

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

After a decade, I sat down to write Urdu and couldn't finish a single sentence.

20 years of practice, from Class 1 through college. All of it quietly erased by Roman Urdu texting and years of neglect.

They say practice makes perfect. Nobody warns you that stopping undoes it just as efficiently. 🙃

[Israr @IsrarAwan]

@a4ambitious Ab pachtaye kya jab chirryan chug gayin khet...