a belated hogwart's letter

 it's mr smear's 11th birthday today! he got a hand-drawn pseudo-hogwart's letter, but considering the fact that he's already been at the real-life equivalent of hogwart's for the past year it's a bit late :P

he spent a good chunk of his day watching harry potter, when he wasn't just chilling. sounds like a pretty good birthday plan to me 🤷‍♂️

...

i just got home deeply frustrated, and i'm feeling burned out for the second day in a row. i've invested an enormous amount of effort in keeping my AI token usage down, and in figuring out how to use mlflow to gain insight into where my token spend is going, but i've hit my daily budget two days in a row and i've already burned through more than half of my monthly limit.

and i have very little to show for it, because anthropic's AI be dumb as fuck. i was complaining to one of the AI guys next to me earlier, and the guy sitting behind me turned out to be the head of the program (just visiting our side of the office for the day) and he jumped in to clarify that i must be doing something wrong. he explained "progressive disclosure" to me (i'm very familiar, just not with the term) and sent me a link to some good tips on writing CLAUDE.md, and recommended claude-mem, which seemed like a good idea, but in retrospect i think that's the reason that i blew through half my daily budget in the last session before i left the office thoroughly deflated and demoralized.

i can't be certain, though, because my teammate asked me to redirect my mlflow traces to a central location, and there they don't provide enough context for me to figure out what the actual calls entailed.

i'm so over AAALLLLLLLLL of this bullshit. it's just ridiculous.

...

tuesday night:

we started watching life of brian - after giving up on a bunch of other movies that plex wasn't playing nicely with - and i had to cut the evening short and climb into bed because i was done.

yesterday:

i've started the past two days reading inside moebius part 1, which is sheer brilliance. having said that, i only barely started it yesterday because i was so inspired to dive into the game design for the tarot-based game i started working on last week. i have some really exciting ideas.

unfortunately, trying to share those ideas with my wife that early in the morning led to a bit of a fight; although it resolved with us both learning something important, it did burn my "roadmap" time and started the day with a shitty vibe. then the work day dragged me down into the dumps, ending with an awful sequence of me losing my mind (and my token budget) trying to understand why all my metrics were disappearing (and subsequently learning that metrics must be whitelisted manually in order to be preserved, but not for all the repos i've been working on), and then being called into a meeting with my client team's lead and making a total ass of myself both because she was asking questions about how the service operated, which is a nightmare to explain and which both of us had very different understandings of, and because i was struggling to untangle a whole lot of related stuff in my head, when all she really wanted to know was "is this possible?", a question which had a very simple answer.

so that was the note i left the office on yesterday. i felt broken, and like my brain was melting out my ears.

...

i met mr smear at the bus stop, and we hopped on a bus to dizengoff in the hopes we'd be able to return the motion controllers we'd bought for his birthday. in addition to having a fun time together, i was extremely relieved (and impressed!) to discover that the guys running the second hand game shop are really decent, and kind, and they did what they could to figure out how we could make the controllers work before pleasantly accepting them and returning the money.

i'll definitely be happy to do business with them again.

we picked up some stuff at the supermarket (including a treat of malt beer for mr smear), had an awkward moment leaving because - for a second time - the self-checkout hadn't sent me my receipt and the security guard wouldn't let us out, and then we returned home for dinner.

after dinner, we finished watching life of brian. i was constantly worried that mr smear would bail, and he did want to at one point, but by the time it was over he informed me that in his opinion it's a solid 8/10 🤘

today:

i got up early, read, and spent just more than an hour on my auto-doc project before heading to the office, very much not wanting to go. as described, the work day sucked. in addition to everything else, during the afternoon i developed painful bloating, and that combined with my work stress to make me really unhappy and very, very keen to get the hell out of there.

gd's not feeling too well either, so for mr smear's birthday dinner we're ordering instead of going out. 

...

good grief.

so hot outside

 i'm so, so tired. i went to bed around 1am (inscryption), and actually slept, but woke up surprisingly early. i read stuff on the balcony as the world woke up - being grateful for the birdsong, and disappointed that my eyesight is so blurry - and one of the things i read has been sitting with me all day:

the unicontext

...

our first daily was awkwardly cut off, most of the day was spent burning tokens on improving observability that led to a complete refactor. the client handled that way more positively than i did :P

also, i learned that the big project that was on hold just got resumed, so i know what i'm going to be doing next week.

everything around those two was AI tracing, and a very uncomfortable and stressful second part of the daily which involved biting my lip because my manager was saying stuff that was so unbelievably wrong... i think i found the right approach to address it and figure out what happened, but i'm not convinced.

...

i had a telephonic doctor's appointment this afternoon, and she's asked me to try a medication with a sedative side-effect, in addition to doing the full bloodwork and visiting a clinic at the hospital that i've never heard of, but am almost sure is the same one i just went to :P

...

the end of the day was more than half an hour of me trying desperately to get out of the office, but trapped by my personal codex agent visibly doing what i asked it to do and being terrified of disconnecting it and then not being able to resume it later.

i met mr smear on the way to the bus to the comics library, where we returned the copy of chainsaw man he'd borrowed and left with an armful of amazing works: two of my favorite asterix comics (the normans and the britons), an amulet book, inside moebius part 1 and my favorite thing is monsters. we got home to a delicious daal dinner, watched the simpsons episode on the prohibition, then went through some of my youtube playlist for mr smear, then showered and brushed teeth, and are now about to sit down and watch something in spite of the fact that i barely managed to keep my eyes open while dragging myself to the shower.

i'm not going rollerblading tonight.

laying tracks

 i made some auto-doc progress this morning, then realized on my way out that i didn't have time to make it to the office, participate in the daily, and return home in time to take mr smear to the doctor... our daily went on for so long, however, that we ended up almost being late for the doctor in any event - i spent ten minutes of the meeting walking and talking to catch the bus to the clinic :P

mr smear's primary complaint was pain that the doctor suspected him of exacerbating by "testing" it. he denied doing so, and she immediately began laughing - he was staring out the window and visibly testing his jaw, making it hurt and continuing to deny he was doing it while we both watched 🤦‍♂️

anyway, he seems fine. and she renewed his prescriptions, which is very much appreciated because she's about to go on vacation for a while - it wasn't a waste of a trip.

after a brief mission to the pharmacy (and encountered loads of mall people), i dropped him off at home and continued on to the office. my coworkers seemed to enjoy the leftover challah-peño. it was a bit of a weird day, with my teammate and i (mostly him) eventually figuring out why mlflow hadn't been working properly and me and the client team having deep conversations about how to redesign - or whether to redesign - a troublesome AI mechanism.

i came home and took mr smear for a walk in the park, on the way back we bumped into big data who handed me another bottle of cider and invited us for a game session. i allowed mr smear a taste of the cider at dinner, which he enjoyed a little too much 🙄

we watched the simpsons: season 8 episode 17 first aired on march 2nd, 1997. they're discussing people who were visiting israel and were kidnapped. OMG the ribbon.

after dinner we went upstairs and were introduced to ticket to ride. i've never played it before, and it was so much fun! also, mr smear did pretty well in spite of the fact that he was so engrossed in arranging his "tracks" that he missed a fundamental aspect of the gameplay... i think everyone who was playing was disappointed when it was called off due to bedtime :P

mr smear and i showered, brushed teeth, and negotiated watching pacific rim - i guess we'll find out tomorrow if he gets up early without a bad vibe, but even gd was up for the final act of the movie and it was glorious ^_^

it's close to midnight. please let me sleep 🙏

...

oh! someone posted an israeli version of jones in the fast lane - ג'ונס בנתיבי איילון - and it's so good mr smear was engaged while i was giving it a try!

sleep journal entry

 neck pain throughout the night, it didn't prevent me from sleeping initially but it prevented me from going back to sleep once i'd woken up.

gd's woken up with serious back trouble, so it looks like i'm going to be taking mr smear to the doctor today...

self-care and kaiju

 i didn't sleep very well last night - no puff - but it wasn't nearly as bad as thursday night (or the nights before tuesday), so i wasn't a total wreck come morning. i got out of bed super early, and immediately got to work flipping between the auto-doc upgrades and the PRD my boss asked me for.

a couple of hours later, the latter was completed and delivered, and i headed out to the hospital sleep clinic to make an appointment for november, and on my way back booked an appointment for our GP to discuss blood tests and a pain clinic referral. when i got home, i booked a consultation with the complementary medicine clinic as well, which i've been meaning to do for a couple of years now.

i spent the next hour and a half working, finally putting my laptop to sleep just as mr smear and i accompanied my sister out the door and to the airport... i made the changes suggested by an article i'd read on the weekend, and so far it looks like it's made the difference, even with claude's sonnet model. so my tokenspiracy theories weren't so wrong after all 🤔

gd couldn't join us, sadly, so the two of them had their emotional farewell in the entrance instead.

it was hot and muggy today, it seems like the heat wave warning we got a few days ago wasn't for nothing.

once we got my sister to security, we said our goodbyes and then went downstairs to find a quiet place for me to talk to my client, who'd been trying to get hold of me ever since we'd left the apartment. while mr smear kept a table and read, i had a fifteen minute chat with him that was very positive; i don't know what he was expecting, but he was kinda thrown by how "maturely" i was taking it... i mean, this is not my first consulting rodeo, so... 🤷‍♂️

what did surprise me was that my notice period is a month and a half, which is longer than the other guy.

mr smear was hungry, and the airport bakery was all dairy, so we agreed i'd get him hummus. i had some of it myself, so i can attest that it was brilliant, and that i understand why he felt the need to inform the guy that it was the greatest hummus he's ever had. it wasn't the best hummus i've ever had, but it was pretty damned good, and he even enjoyed the chickpeas themselves which he usually doesn't.

so that was cool.

we came back via azrieli, which involved a lot of stairs up to the mall and a rush to wash my hands of whatever wetness some stranger managed to bestow on one of them 🤮

then we caught a bus home, both of us having had our fill of the sweaty, jam-packed, no-sense-of-personal-space masses. i was absolutely exhausted, but i'd been exhausted all day, so i chugged a coffee and worked hard until i was done (waiting on a review), and then crashed on the couch for a while.

when i came to, i finished my tea and did a little auto-doc work while playing inscryption, then it was dinner time and we watched the simpsons, ate a delicious dinner, had a long chat with my mom, showered, and sat down on the couch to continue watching pacific rim.

pacific rim is incredible, it's gorgeous, it's wonderful, it's insane, and it's such a trip enjoying it together with my son!

now he's gone to bed (he's been reading himself to sleep the past while, it's summer holidays), and i think i'm going to turn off and play some more before i go to bed. it's been a pretty big day.

cotton wool brain

 oh, yeah... i remember now. one of the reasons i usually avoid cannabis is that it renders me extremely slow and unmotivated. after having coffee and writing up my previous post, i tried reading some more of stranger in a strange land. that put me to sleep for another hour or so. after that, i was able to think deep-feeling thoughts about my perpetual all-consuming need to be constantly doing all the things that need to get done, but not able to think useful thoughts about it, and i played a little more inscryption and watched stuff while eating breakfast.

mr smear got up, and i agreed to join him for his inscryption time after breakfast, but after he'd played for a little bit (it was a resumed game we had no context for, and he lost) his friend called to ask him to come over then instead of later. mr smear is not exactly mr spontaneous, but gd and i both pleaded with him to go, and then threatened him, and even though he initially had a shitty attitude, by the time we walked out together he was fine, and he ended up having a really good time.

hell, his friend's mom took the two of them to see the new spiderman movie, so he had a pretty good afternoon.

the challah-peño was much hotter than usual. neither of us noticed last night at dinner, but mr smear and i both noticed this morning.

i ended up taking another long nap after dropping mr smear off, and woke up to the sounds of my sister heading out for a spell. it was only after my third coffee that my brain-fog started lifting and i slowly started getting into Doing Stuff.

later, gd ran my sister through a tarot reading, which combined with the game idea i was discussing with sailor to inspire me to design something. once i had a rough idea, i then realized that one of my problems when creating a project in unity is that i'm overly-ambitious and immediately planning the full game when what i really need to be doing is iteratively exploring building the individual mechanisms that will ultimately come together to form the end result.

so today, i focused on a menu screen for a card game. between my idea and codex's access to the code and the unity mcp, i'm very, very pleased with the result ^_^

after mr smear got home, i let him have some screen time before my sister and i took him to the beach. he moaned most of the way there, and really got on my nerves, and even using ice cream as a motivator only lasted a few minutes...

... so he sat on the beach and played with his feet in the sand, refusing to put on swimming trunks and join us, and we had a great time in the incredible water (the temperature was perfect), and then enjoyed a magnificent sunset while dragging mr smear off the beach to go and get ice creams.

i almost offed my sister when we sat down at the table, due to a misunderstanding i pulled the chair out from under her as she was sitting and barely managed to get it back in time O_o

that was when mr smear told me that he'd had a pretty good day. i gave him a fist-bump and pretended to have forgotten all the grumblings and occasional violence and general meanness... on our way out of there, though, we asked him to take a photo of us and he refused, so while fortunately a stranger was happy to help us it didn't improve my vibe much :/

the walk to the bus was pleasant. the bus itself? first, a horrible smell of a passenger who peed himself, second, escaping from that smell into the high pressure of a crowded middle section with mr smear getting stepped on.

we got off a stop early, enjoyed a nice walk home, showered, ate gd's delicious concoction, watched half an hour of pacific rim, and since then i've been writing this and upgrading my auto-doc at the same time. and in a few minutes, i'm going to bed.

...

my sister's returning to london tomorrow, and none of us - including her - want her to go. we talked about that at length this afternoon, i really hope we can figure something out.

chewing on life's gristle

omg i'm not crazy!

according to this article, claude *did* get dumber and more expensive, but it's my own fault for not reading the release notes :P

...

our upstairs friends came over for a bit - gd treated them to a preview of the sushi and onigiri, and they treated me to a bottle and a half of rather nice cider. they also offered to help us rescue my sister from ra'anana, as two of the weekend busses didn't show up and she was stuck out in the heat for over two hours while continuing to believe that one was coming... one eventually did arrive, though.

i just couldn't decide what to do with myself last night after dinner, so i continued playing inscryption and achieved a couple of minor events i'd never seen before. i didn't realize / had forgotten that you have to lose a game between getting the dagger and removing the... no spoilers... and discovered that defeating the wall of grizzlies twice and winning without meeting the final conditions leads to getting your death card pinned on the door with a little medal :P

[one run with unkillable squirrels with unkillable friends, including a black goat and an ouroboros. one run with an unkillable queen ant and an unkillable black goat. seriously OP]

i'm very grateful that last night's puff worked again. perhaps i didn't take a proper one on thursday night, i find with a vape it's hard to tell 🤷‍♂️

my sister's leaving tomorrow already, and it feels like none of us really wants her to leave...

small accomplishments

we got shit done today. it took a while to get everyone roused, and gd and i had a bit of a tiff along the way, but the two of us abandoned our child to the screen gods and caught a bus to the shoe repair store where i dropped off my very expensive but now quite broken sandals, and she convinced me to listen to him and do the decidedly non-vegan thing of repairing them with leather, which makes me quite uncomfortable :/

we hit the supermarket - which is a surprisingly good one - on arlozorov, and eventually got out of there with most of what we needed. we caught a bus back home, yelled at mr smear for having put the air-conditioner on when all the windows were wide open, and then mr smear and i went on another mission to the street north of us, which required three stops but we got pretty much everything that remained on the list.

then mr smear and i left for the mall, catching a very cramped mini-bus and mr smear managed to keep it together in spite of the small kids around him. we paid the optometrist a visit and ordered his new glasses (apparently his eyesight has improved a little), along the way happening to pass the second hand game store and asking on a whim if they had what mr smear's been begging for for his birthday - motion controllers for the ps4.

i'd called another shop earlier about that, and learned that nobody's selling them or repairing them (the mongoose left us a couple that seem to be broken or in need of battery replacement), so i was surprised to learn that they had one pair, and they gave me a bit of a discount (still quite expensive).

so mr smear was very excited.

then we did one last mission to pick up another fan and a kettle because ours died this week, and caught a bus home. on the bus, a conversation we had led to mr smear deciding that he really wants to write a diss track response to dan bull because one of his songs isn't as amazing as the others, and i have to admit i'm quite impressed with what he's got so far!

i was crashing on the way home - recalling that i didn't sleep last night - but i made myself a coffee and wrestled with the motion controllers. poor mr smear, standing there with the vr helmet on and the controllers finally connected and strapped on, and discovering that the games he was hoping to play with them don't support them :(

we should have done some research first... anyway, i tried.

i tried to do something of value, but ended up opening inscryption instead (i really wanted to play braid, but it doesn't work on mac), and i've just kneaded the challah-peño and can't decided what my next steps are. perhaps nothing.

upended

 there's this ridiculous idea that's conned most of the software industry, that human engineers can and will be replaced by AI. that AI is cheaper than the human labor that it replaces. that driving adoption means tokenmaxxing, that AI vendors will continually reduce costs and improve the models. that the playing field has been leveled and anyone with an AI agent at their disposal now has godlike powers.

these past couple of months, the chickens have started coming home to roost. all the prices have gone up, but the vendors aren't making any money because it's still costing them more compute per token than they're asking for. so they, in turn, are dialing down their models because the dumber they are, the more loops it takes to get stuff done.

very few companies can afford the burn.

my client is one of the many that can't. so, weeks after a town hall in which they explained how finances were tight, followed a short time later by explaining that autonomous agentic workflows are going to be the primary mechanism for software delivery and on-call resolution, followed by a week of costs going up while productivity tanks... i arrived at the office on wednesday morning to discover that everyone had been allocated a $12 per day AI budget.

average costs per day had been in the high double digits to low triple digits the whole week.

there was a massive uproar, and the budget was increased to $30 per day. barely enough to get anything done, and engineering is beginning to understand that this effectively means returning to the good old days of having to understand what you're doing and craft code like peasants. there's only one problem, though: last year the company fired half its staff, and rotated all the rest, so nobody actually has any experience with the software they're officially responsible for. hell, barely anybody even knows which software is under their ownership. at a guess, i'd say that the ratio of software engineers to software repositories is somewhere around 5:100, which is something i think about a lot since learning about conway's law and organizational scaling.

it'd be funny if it wasn't so sad. and the saddest part is that these blunders are hurting real people, with real families to provide for and real mortgages to pay off.

...

i spent a large chunk of my day fixing a deployment pipeline - some random devops guy had made a change a couple of months ago that literally did nothing but break it - while expensively asking the AI tough questions to ensure that it wasn't making shit up. i also had a lot of issues with the company-mandated claude code wreaking havoc with any and every plugin or skill i attempted to work with.

i did take a pleasant break to coach sailor on working with AI, and continuously snipe him for insisting on staying south africa instead of coming home.

...

i came home, took mr smear for a pleasant walk around the park, then returned for dinner, then took another walk with gd and my sister as well, for a tour of our old neighborhood and a good view of a particularly impressive moon.

after getting home and showering, we watched a little but more of redline, then put mr smear to bed and repeated the trick of me taking a puff before passing out and actually sleeping again.

gd says my snore is the most comfortable she's ever heard.

...

i began yesterday doing random shit on the balcony, including trying to help the ex-saffer i met a few weeks ago whose department has just been laid off. i caught up on quite a bit of reading, watching, and had a big breakfast before heading out to the office.

i started my day trying to work with haiku, but anthropic's cheapest, shittiest model is so useless it seemed to be trolling me and i immediately switched back to sonnet. work-wise, i spent most of my day planning and executing a task i had been expecting to get to on monday or tuesday, and thinking very, very hard about my personal AI usage and what a harness should look like. and trying and failing to get anything real done on that last score.

i hit my $30 limit shortly after lunch, but the software to track it hadn't been installed yet, so it seemed fitting that that was the point at which i voluntarily restarted my machine and synced with the rest of the organization :P

...

that was around the time i got a phone call out of the blue from my mentor, who informed me that my client has apparently decided to stop working with outsiders altogether and that the two of us currently embedded with them will be moving on in a month's time. apparently this is a money thing, because their feedback for both of us has been positive, so i guess my town-hall feelings from a few weeks ago weren't wrong...

i asked what i should be focusing on to make sure i get to my next client as quickly and smoothly as possible, and he informed me that between my auto-doc project and consistent publishing of articles he doesn't believe i'll have too much trouble. this is good.

i waited until my counterpart had been informed by his mentor, and the two of us sat on the balcony for half an hour strategizing. he'd been taking the whole thing a bit personally - his new manager has been behaving very strangely since the big reshuffle a couple of weeks ago - and i think it helped him when i put the pieces together and suggested that the manager probably knew this was coming and just isn't very subtle about trying to get ahead of it.

either way, we have a month to focus on up-skilling in AI and we're in a pretty good place to be doing so. i also told him about the up-skilling solution i pitched to the boss, and he's interested in helping me make that happen, so that's good.

...

by the end of the day, i'd installed codex with my personal subscription on my work computer, and delivered a first iteration that looked pretty good, and had an awkward encounter with my client who's pretending everything's cool until they break the news to us on sunday, and had a wild political debate with the AI guys that was actually quite fun.

and stopped myself from "just one last deployment" on a thursday evening :P

mr smear wasn't at home when i arrived, he'd gone off to a new friend's place for a swim. i quickly shared an update with gd (i thought my sister could hear me, so i had to re-tell over dinner), then headed to the hairdresser. crazy singing guy was outside again, harassing the nail salon next door, and i got a pretty decent haircut - i think? - and then came home to shower and do a little more AI work until mr smear got back and we could sit down for onigiri (to celebrate the girls finding a mold) and corn on the cob.

the AI work i did was validating. codex is simply better.

dinner was delicious, then i did a little more fiddling around with AI and unity, and then we all sat down to finish watching redline. redline is a phenomenal movie, with a bizarrely jarring ending (kind of like grease), but really the greatest pleasure in watching it is seeing it as an art delivery mechanism. it's gorgeous, and it's simply mind-blowing seeing how gorgeous it is knowing how it was made.

...

i took another puff last night, but it didn't seem to take. am i already developing a tolerance after two nights? last night was long, and my lower back hurt a bit, and i barely got any sleep between lying restless and uncomfortable, and then i finally had enough just over an hour ago and climbed out of bed and am now sitting on the balcony typing this with half an eye on the world waking up around me.

sleeping powder

my sister suggested something last night, after we'd all gorged ourselves on vegan sushi and my mouth had been filled with regret after allowed mr smear to coerce me into trying a bite of vegan cheese with a marshmallow, which imparted a lasting taste of feet.

oh, and we watched some more of redline, and mr smear is INTO that stuff.

immediately after putting mr smear to bed, i brushed my teeth, made sure to empty my bladder, took a headache tablet and a puff from gd's vape. she didn't think i'd had enough, but i lay down, convinced myself it was going to be alright, slowed my breathing, and woke up this morning feeling a bit groggy, but having actually slept through the night.

...

this post has taken most of an hour to write, primarily because i ended up on a side quest to tag older posts, and secondarily to produce the gif above because i searched hard for it and it apparently didn't exist. now to start my actual day.