I. "I've taken down your complaint, Mr. Henson, and I'll dispatch a new team immediately to have a look and fix the cameras. Really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Henson." The voice was so soft, so wispy. Henson thought he could hear this voice all his life. Then, he thought about what Barbara had said in the cafe...

Some time back, in a routine cleanup of my many drafts, I found one where I "introduced" vāk, the blogging script/tool I use to run my blog. I never quite finished that draft. I am certain I must've dissuaded myself from writing it by thinking, "no one's going to read it anyway." About a couple of days back, I...

Lucide icons is a superset of Feather icons. It has some really wonderful icons for interface design and is one of the most popular icon sets today. In the past, for my Elm projects, I've used Feather icons. In new Elm projects, I wanted to use Lucide Icons, only to discover that there is no Elm package to import...

A twenty-something and their ChatGPT has produced a code artefact that is currently in production. Somewhere deep in the code soup, there is this utility function... function calculateShipping(weight, distance, isExpress) { const baseRate = 5.99; const weightRate = weight * 0.5; const distanceRate = distance * 0.1;...

Much to my sadistic little delight, I read this morning that vibe-coding (and other similar variations of LLM-driven software building) does not help you acquire skills or learn much. LLMs, on the other hand, are trying to give you the sharpest, closest solution possible. When learning through an LLM (especially...

Stories of the True, Jeyamohan (Transl. Priyamvada) Jeyamohan's stories are hard-hitting without a trace of fetishization of the downtrodden (like poverty porn). My first brush with his stories was a narration by Bava Chelladurai of his Elephant Doctor which moved me to tears. I took printouts of this and another...

"The new lingua franca of programming is English." "I don't look at code anymore. I don't look at diffs." "There is no way I can look at 3000+ diff patches anymore. It's all spec-driven." At first, it's a hard thing to grapple with as a cautious optimist. To not look at code anymore, and yet build things that span...

Short aphorisms on AI-assisted (and sometimes AI-driven) software engineering. 1. AI-ludditism is futile AI-skepticism is fair, AI-ludditism is futile. AI-assisted programming is here to stay (unless the bubble bursts and leads to prohibitively-expensive tokens). "AI has sucked the fun out of programming" is a proxy...

I had a really long experiment session with Claude today to see if there were other abstractions and functional programming ideas that I could tap into, to make my game model succinct. Many ideas floated around — MTL (monad-transformers), effect libraries, Free monad etc. I picked the Free monad path and tried to...

Today, I added a bundling script so that the common JS output from the Purescript files can be run like a (node) executable. With some basic esbuild configuration and this line: spago build && node bundle.js && chmod +x ./dist/word-ladder, the final executable can be just run directly in a node shell. Following from...

I decided to try building the game as a CLI/terminal app before shifting to the frontend/Elm parts of it. So I spent time writing out the game loop essentially. I modeled the game state first: type GameState = { gameStatus :: GameStatus , dictionary :: Set String , gameWords :: Tuple String String , lastPlayedWord...

I've been thinking of writing some small toy-programs / games. Preferably in Elm if it's just UI, and Purescript if it involves some backend. Honed in on something to do with "levenshtein distance" so, basically, a word-ladder game. In prepping for this, I thought I could write the base logic in Purescript first to...