Bruno de Carvalho

Thaumaturge. Deterministic, but Indeterminable.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

Is it weird that AI coding assistance is not giving me identity fracture?

A lot of software developers are feeling disoriented and threatened these days. Programming by hand is clearly going the way of the buggy whip and the hand-cranked auger. Which is how we're finding out that a lot of people have their identities bound up in being good at hand-coding and how it feels to do that.

That's not me. It's not me at all. Rather to my surprise, I don't miss coding by hand, not any more than I missed writing assembler when compilers ate the world and made that unnecessary. (That was in a couple years back around 1983, for you youngsters.)

Maybe the fact that I'm not feeling any of this disorientation disqualifies me from having anything to say to people who are. On the other hand...if you can learn to emulate my mental stance and be completely unbothered, maybe that would be a good thing?

So. If you're a programmer, and you're feeling disoriented, try this on for size:

I like being a wizard. I like being able to speak spells, to weave complex patterns of logic that make things happen in the world. Writing code is a way to manifest my will.

Yes, I've piled up a lot of arcane knowledge over the 50 years I've been doing this. But languages of invocation, they come and they go. Been a long time since I've had any use for being able to program in 8086 assembler, and that's okay. I have better spells now, and these days some rather powerful familiars.

What I'm inviting you to do is think of yourself as a wizard. Not as a person who writes code, but as a person who is good at assuming the kind of mental states required to bend reality with the application of spells.

And if that's who you are, does it matter if the spells are painstakingly scribed in runes of power, versus being spoken to an obedient machine spirit?

It's all one; it's all the manifestation of will. Arcane languages come and go, machine spirits appear and then diminish to be replaced by more powerful ones, but you? You are the magic-wielder. Without you, none of it happens.

Same as it ever was. Same is it ever was. And so mote it be.

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

OH: “it’s giving strong ‘I google myself’ energy” (about some self-aggrandizing idiot).

New go-to unlocked.

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

So basically Trump now has majority control over the Fed board, he waits for Powell to resign, puts in his own guy, they cut rates back to zero, money printer goes brrrr, assets pump, we lose reserve status, but at least we have big Zimbabwe amounts of money? Is that accurate?

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

This is so beautifully articulated.

[ℏεsam @Hesamation]

"I use AI in a separate window. I don't enjoy Cursor or Windsurf, I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers."

@dhh, the legendary programmer and creator of Ruby on Rails has the most beautiful and philosophical idea about what AI takes away from programmers.

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

Flaky tests are fun because they make you sit there and question whether your logic really works about 5x as hard as you did the first time you wrote it.

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

The sheer amount of developer tooling out there that refuses to respect (or at the very least provide opt-in support for) XDG standards saddens me.

[Inverse Cramer @CramerTracker]

New pope: 2 days

Entry level position: 5 interviews, 15 back and forth emails, 2 take home assignments, 6 weeks of ghosting

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

It’s 2025. We out here one-shotting entire products with LLMs while Siri/Apple “Intelligence” still feels like bad tech from the early 00’s. Like… How?

Does anyone at Apple use this stuff?

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

@flydotio 😮 Y’all feature apps running on your stack? @f and I built one recently, https://t.co/mZLwhB9upK (or https://t.co/kTToHAxzDQ)

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

@f Claude is requiring more and more prompting to NOT be a tryhard.

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

(Could have been worse)

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

happy 420 ☀️

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

@ruiaureliano Parabéns! 🙌

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

Cool, let’s go back a couple weeks and maybe undo all this tariff fuckery kthx

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

@hellwaiver Congratulations 🙌🚀

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

Claude Desktop's MCP setup is some pretty disappointing UX but the functionality is just... *chef's kiss*

Coming soon to an https://t.co/AD9XKAVV62 near you, my new favorite way to learn things 🧑‍🍳🚀

[Chris Trott @twocentstudios]

New blog post: Train Tracker Devlog

https://t.co/ARrLhruS37

I started working on a spinoff app from Eki Bright that does train tracking in a Live Activity.

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

I’m *pretty* upset at this whole “if text has an em dash, it’s AI generated” trend.

Excuse me, some of us actually care about how we write 🤬

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

@buckwilson So cool!

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

@Zirkman Not very useful; adds a menu entry to open a window tailing logs (I prefer doing it via cmdline) and enables cmd+opt+shift+i to open chrome dev tools.

Delete ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/developer_settings.json to restore things.

[Bruno de Carvalho @biasedbit]

who put this here and... why?