Josh Nichols

Principal Whimsy Engineer for myself, Staff Software Engineer for @GustoHQ. Hobby hobbyist, husband, father, noun, . Opinions are my own.

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@nateberkopec I think about it like guardrails along a cliffside road. Like, yes, it is now harder to go over the edge, but still possible to do in the right circumstances

[Nate Berkopec @nateberkopec]

https://t.co/AedF8Knlqo

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Situation 1: dev A thinks approach X is correct, dev B thinks Y is the right way. They argue and try to convince each other.

Situation 2: dev A thinks approach X is correct, tells the LLM to implement it.

There is SO MUCH learning in Situation 1, lost when using LLMs....

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@nateberkopec You’re absolutely right. That is exactly kind of concern to have, and is a load bearing belt and suspender.

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@nateberkopec Came across https://t.co/fBj8fSv4HJ recently and it has been great for giving these patterns a name. And for feeding into ny writing voice skill to not do them 😅

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@samsaffron I did some of the same things wrt to spelunking through the claude binary, but a) felt like a gray area and b) could be its own entire post

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

Claude Code prompts for `python3 -c '# comment\nprint(42)'` even with auto-mode on. Not a bug.

There's a Bash parser in there with opinions, one of 6 layers between your keystroke and execution. Mapped them all.

https://t.co/j6vyuHrPpX

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@samsaffron It is, thanks! I started this before auto mode came out and haven’t had the chance to spelunk it more closely

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

Repeat after me: CLAUDE.md, skills, and anything else in the context window is at best a suggestion. Hooks are the only way to enforce behavior

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

two weeks running Claude Code with /sandbox. here's the config that actually works, the stuff that broke, and the stuff that's still broken.
https://t.co/8DLZzyBW4Q

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

"That's awesome, congrats" takes thirty seconds. "Great, now what about Y?" takes the same thirty seconds but leaves someone deflated.

Wrote about the skipped acknowledgment and why we keep doing it to each other

https://t.co/JY8YkgbBW1

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@nateberkopec I was coming around to a similar idea, but slightly different motivation. I was working through architecture and design decisions, and found myself wanting to quote reply to stuff in a file, rather than replying and chatting about jt

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@nateberkopec Misread as “it will slop”, like the antonym of “it will slap”

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

~/.claude/ is basically production. No staging, no isolation. Every Claude Code plugin mutates your daily driver config. Wrote up how to set up a proper test environment after borking mine one too many times. https://t.co/1ZCbJqtr6z

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@hakunin Oh no! I don’t think there will be anything I directly help, so definitely contact support if you haven’t already. Once you have a case number, you can send it my way and I’ll make sure it gets routed to the right place internally

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@headius That'd be great! I'll DM to find a time to chat

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

My team is hiring! Come work on sidekiq, karafka, and other async stuff with Gusto (see what I did there?)
https://t.co/t0OhwlS8TM

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@bcardarella I’ve had that happen before when I said to use a subagent. I didn’t track it as a Task though, and just immediately came back said it is running in the background (?!)

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@nateberkopec The other tty- gems are great too. I’ve probably used tty-table and tty-markdown the most with it

[Josh Nichols @techpickles]

@nateberkopec The same could be said of human-augmented dev, LLM just tends to have lot less context to start with