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Posted by vinhnx 8 hours ago

Fix your tools(ochagavia.nl)
164 points | 60 commentspage 2
yegle 6 hours ago|
My friend once told this joke:

> "A good programmer, when encountering a debugger bug," he paused, cleared his throat, and said solemnly: "should immediately drop the program they're debugging and start debugging the debugger instead!" The auditorium once again erupted in thunderous applause.

maccard 6 hours ago||
I aim for the Boy Scout rule - always leave things better than you found it. It’s always a balance and you have to not lose the forest for the trees. Always ask what is the end goal, and am I still moving forward on that.
esafak 3 hours ago|
When I find something wrong with my tools I file a report or submit a fix.
cloverich 5 hours ago||
If you're still dipping your toes into an LLM world, this is an excellent place to begin. I helped with a deploy at work the other day, we have some QA instructions (Notion). I pointed the LLM at one of the sections, asked it to generate task list for each section, and once that looked good, had to convert the processes into a set of scripts. The latest models make short work of scriptable stuff that you can use for debugging, testing, poking, summarizing, etc.
doctorhandshake 5 hours ago||
My version of this is ‘always be toolin’, but then of course one must use judgement lest it be better to just get on with it.
chihuahua 7 hours ago||
Ugh, this brings on flashbacks to when I had to work with Ruby, and the *** debugger would break with every single release. The RubyMine IDE that 45% of the company used was based on some bizarre custom Ruby gems to enable debugging, and that crap would take a month to be fixed by JetBrains. 10% used VSCode where debugging would sometimes work and sometimes not.
r1cka 7 hours ago||
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first 4 sharpening the axe"
phendrenad2 6 hours ago||
I always liked "The craftsman who wishes to do his work well must first sharpen his tools" by Confucius
bluGill 6 hours ago||
[flagged]
b00ty4breakfast 5 hours ago||
hello, it's me the Language Fairy.

Sometimes when people use an expression to convey an idea concisely , the details of the imaginary scenario within the expression are less important than the concept being expressed (just so long as the general shape of that scenario fits the thing being discussed).

To be more particular, the exact time it takes to sharpen an ax and chop down a tree are not important here.

bluGill 47 minutes ago||
people are so far removed from the ax that they don't realize my point. I'm sure the people Lincoln was talking to had more knowledge and so would get a different picture from the modern reader.
d--b 7 hours ago||
Also, FYI: Claude is very good at fixing tools
wofo 2 hours ago|
That's what I actually used to fix this one! I'm not too deep into the JVM ecosystem, so I gave Claude a try just in case... and it fixed it :)

Btw I didn't mention it in the blog post, because I think that would have derailed the conversation (after all, the point of the article is not "use LLMs", but "fix your tools"). In any case, I agree that LLMs can make it easier to fix the tools without getting side-tracked.

wofo 8 hours ago||
OP here, thanks for submitting!
bpavuk 8 hours ago||
hey, the idea of Krossover is actually dope! my sole question is, why does it exist?

I understand that one might call Rust from Kotlin for performance reasons (I do that often, Mozilla does, some others too), but Kotlin from Rust? where would it be useful?

no snark or subtext here, I'm genuinely curious

wofo 7 hours ago||
Calling Kotlin from Rust (and other languages) is useful when you want access to an existing Kotlin codebase and would rather avoid creating a full-blown port. I guess most people don't do things like this because creating bindings for languages that are not C (or C-like) is usually cumbersome. Krossover is trying to fill that gap for Kotlin. Does that make sense?
bpavuk 3 hours ago||
pretty much!

I'm still curious about case studies. I can imagine that something has SDK for Kotlin but not for Rust, yet outside of that case, technical benefits are not yet obvious to me.

obsidianbases1 8 hours ago||
How'd you get the notice that this was submitted so quickly?
wofo 7 hours ago|||
I got a notification through F5 bot (https://f5bot.com/)
obsidianbases1 4 hours ago||
Good to know, thanks!
bombcar 7 hours ago|||
If you watch your refers you'll see HN pretty easily. Could be even setup as a notification.
mentalgear 6 hours ago||
"first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us"
adriaanmol 6 hours ago|
Next time use AI.