I use a chat interface as a research tool when there’s something I don’t know how to do, like write a relationship with custom conditions using sqlalchemy, or I want to clarify my understanding on something. first I do a Kagi search. If I don’t find what I’m looking for on Stack Overflow or library docs in a few minutes then I turn to the AI.

I don’t use autocompletion - I stick with LSP completions.

I do consider environmental damage. There are a few things I do to try to reduce damage:

1. Search first
2. Search my chat history for a question I’ve already asked instead of asking it again.
3. Start a new chat thread for each question that doesn’t follow a question I’ve already asked.

On the third point, my understanding is that when you write a message in an LLM chat all previous messages in the thread are processed by the LLM again so it has context to respond to the new message. (It’s possible some providers are caching that context instead of replaying chat history, but I’m not counting on that.) My thinking is that by starting new threads I’m saving resources that would have been used replaying a long chat history.

I use Claude 4.5.

I ask general questions about how to do things. It’s most helpful with languages and libraries I don’t have a lot of experience with. I usually either check docs to verify what the LLM tells me, or verify by testing. Sometimes I ask for narrowly scoped code reviews, like “does this refactored function behave equivalently to the original” or “how could I rewrite this snippet to do this other thing” (with the relevant functions and types pasted into the chat).

My company also uses Code Rabbit AI for code reviews. It doesn’t replace human reviewers, and my employer doesn’t expect it to. But it is quite helpful, especially with languages and libraries that I don’t have a lot of experience with. But it probably consumes a lot more tokens than my chat thread research does.

I haven’t used Forgejo, but from the docs it looks like it’s actions system is nearly identical to Github’s. And yes, that sounds like a good case for a scheduled workflow

I’ve got a solution for a situation that is temptingly similar, but unfortunately probably not helpful for your specific case since I’m using partitions instead of user accounts. I have a separate partition for work (specifically a second SSD) because my employer insisted I install remote access software, and that’s not going on my personal partition. I ran into a problem where my Bluetooth MAC is the same on both partitions (because it’s the same device), but only one partition has the pairing keys for my headphones. On the other partition the headphones see the computer as an already-paired device, so refuse to pair again, but can’t connect either due to lack of a key.

I fixed the problem by copying the pairing state files from one partition to the other, and now my devices connect seamlessly either way. I think those files are in /var/lib/bluetooth/<BT-Adapter-MAC-address>, but my memory isn’t super clear.

Dammit - now I’m cringing at the thought of datomaceous earth in the USB port!

Neat! It sounds like this is also an improvement for people running Linux PCs. I don’t have any complaints about running with Proton - especially since I learned how to set up Proton-GE to run in native Wayland mode. But I always appreciate when devs make an effort to support Linux users!

I find that Vimium makes web stuff pretty keyboard usable. There are gaps, like it often doesn’t work well with non-native drop-downs. Unfortunately Vimium does override web app shortcuts, so when you find an app that does have good shortcuts you have to register a rule to disable Vimium for that site.

Lol! I think it’s a nice car because it’s the car I’ve always wanted: a small electric hatchback.

We have a dog

It’s a Chevy Bolt

Sorry! This is it: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-on-droid

My wife is. Well, I’m stretching the truth a little - she actually uses Manjaro.

I was going to say we don’t have any of these distros in the car, but technically I do have Nix on my phone - there’s a fork of Termux that puts Nix in a user space sandbox. And the phone does connect to the car. The only piece missing Android Auto integration for the nix command.

I also have a “btw” decal to go with this. I haven’t put it on because I’m not sure about including it.

It’s me and my older child who use NixOS btw

That’s almost exactly it! Puppy Linux represents the dog, who would run Puppy Linux if anyone would think to get a computer for her

My work is using Coderabbit, and I’ve found its feedback to be pretty helpful - especially since I’m working with a language I don’t have a whole lot of experience with (Python). I check what it tells me, but it has taught me some new things. I still want human reviews as well, but the AI can pick up on detail that is easy to skim over.

It doesn’t cover bigger picture stuff like maintainability, architecture, test coverage. Recently I reviewed a PR that was likely AI generated; I saw a number of cases where logic duplication invited future bugs. (Stuff like duplicating access predicates across CRUD handlers for the same resource, repeating the same validation logic in multiple places.) Also magic strings instead of enums, tests of dubious value. Coderabbit did not comment on those issues.

I’m also getting feedback from Sonarqube on the same project, which I think is static analysis. It’s much less helpful. It has less to say, and a lot of that is pointing out security issues in test code.

I did the swipe to complete an -ing suffix, and yes, I see the appeal!

Entering punctuation is a bit slow using long-presses on the apostrophe key. Maybe I can get used to using the symbol layer instead.

Oh! You can swipe from the 123 key to type a symbol from the symbol layer in one gesture! That’s great! It even works for comma! Kinda accidentally - given the comma position I’m swiping over question mark, backspace, comma which gets a net result of typing just the comma. I wish it would go back immediately to the ABC layer.

Moving the cursor by holding and dragging from space feels better than the similar feature in gboard!

I miss the gboard backspace feature where you can hold and drag to selectively delete.

Me too, but I sometimes access my Obsidian notes in Neovim using obsidian.nvim. If I’m doing substantial editing it’s nice to have my usual editor. And then the experience is pretty similar to VimWiki.

Fugitive, the vim / neovim plugin. It does everything the CLI does, but uses vim interfaces very effectively to enhance the experience. For example it’s quite good for selectively staging changes from a file. I also like the option to open a buffer with the version of a file from any specified commit.

I also tried neogit which aims to port magit to neovim. I didn’t like it as much. Partly because as far as I could tell at the time it lacked features compared to fugitive. But also because it seemed to want me to do everything through UIs in its own custom windows. Fugitive is integrated more thoroughly into vim via command mode, and special buffers.

I usually use git add -p to selectively stage hunks. But in git add -i I think running the patch command does the same thing to get into patch mode.

If patch mode shows you a hunk, and you only want some of the lines you can press s to split into smaller hunks. Then you’ll be prompted whether to add each smaller hunk separately.

If you want to stage a change that is on the same line as a change you don’t want to stage, or on an adjacent line, then you need to use e to edit the hunk. Git stages whatever changes are left when you’re done editing. The file in the working tree on disk is unchanged.

That makes sense. I didn’t find many surveys available, so I referenced the ones I could find.

It’s hard to predict the future, but I can point to a couple of indexes.

TIOBE measures language popularity according to a variety of factors. It has Java on a steady downward trend over the last couple of decades, but shows it as still very relevant. TIOBE does not show comparable growth for Golang. I don’t see much growth in the top 10 for languages that are especially suited to autoscaling. C# looks to be steady as a language in a similar niche as Java.

OTOH another survey from devjobsscanner that looks purely at job postings shows Java openings as very steady over the last couple of years. It also shows Java as more popular than Golang.

So I don’t know exactly what conclusion to draw from that. But learning a new language can be a helpful exercise regardless to broaden your perspective, and to keep your skills sharp.

Personally for the purpose of producing resource-efficient binaries for scaling I prefer Rust. It’s design incorporates some correct-by-construction strategies that promote high-quality code. And it’s well-suited for compiling to WASM so you can do stuff like deploy small services to Cloudflare workers for wild scaling. But I guess Rust isn’t making a big showing in the popularity charts. And Golang is popular for its lower learning curve.