There’s a kind of shift occurring beneath software development right now. It has now become almost trivial to spin up a project that I wouldn’t have had time for not so long ago. I wrote about the benefits of AI slop a couple weeks ago, and it turns out that I only really scratched the surface. One of these is in support of the Save Wisdom Project championed by Brian Roemmele.

I’ve been “busy” fiddling around with agentic coding using the Pi agent. This time around, it’s to see what the real limits of a local agent and model truly are. Why? I ran out of Claude tokens on an unrelated project, and that made me wonder just how far I could get without using it in a pinch. As it turns out… local models are pretty limited, but functional with enough planning.

Last week I started working on a project, and this time I wanted to see what would happen if I did what all the “cool kids” are doing and “vibe coded” most of it. Let me just say it was an absolute disaster. I ended up with about 18k lines of iffy spaghetti code that only kind of does what I asked, is chock full of bugs, and isn’t anything I would ever willingly publish in my name.

Back when I was a Sophomore in High School, my incredibly astute power of observation noticed a couple friends playing a card game after finishing some work in our Russian class. They asked if I wanted to try it, and I shrugged and assented, because hey, why not? A Short History I had no idea what I was doing. After the draw phase, I ended up with various cards and a Royal Assassin, which you can use to destroy a tapped creature.

I turned 48 last week, and it was almost as uneventful as I’d hoped. I preemptively took the week off so I spent most of the time relaxing, eating out occasionally, or otherwise doing absolutely nothing constructive. I really needed that. The only problem is that I started coming down with some kind of cold on the 10th. It progressed into an insanely sore throat that resembled gargling rusty razor blades, which I suspected was either the current variant of Covid dubbed razor-blade throat or strep.