rules vs skills

i don't know where to begin this post, so i'll start with the ridiculous: today i learned that the company harness that everyone's forced to use with claude includes a rule that actively interferes with writing tests. and their automated code reviewer is a real stickler for good tests. this essentially leads to everyone (already confirmed with my onboarding buddy and my fellow contractor) being forced to run an absurd number of review cycles for each change, which is extremely expensive both in time and tokens and patience.

i'm confident that i found the cause because - with my custom harness wrapping their harness - i was able to disable the conflicting rule and i've had three code reviews since where the test coverage wasn't an issue.

this is literally insane.

it's now half-past midnight as i write this, and i only just finished writing up an article after / while putting my "fix" through its paces, excitedly watching my agent actually being thorough with purpose ^_^

i'm still laughing at my fellow contractor - her team won the company AI hackathon a few months ago - being absolutely delighted to hear that she's not the only one who's been struggling with this nonsense, and it was super-cool that someone who has a lot of real experience on the AI frontier praising my system (both my skills library and my harness).

this was all really cool.

...

the day got off to a rocky start over a frying pan, which both gd and i navigated and eventually (pretty quickly) understood why it was such a big deal and how to proceed. from there the day went pretty well.

oh... no. wait. both gd and i had nightmares last night. hers was pretty intense (everyone missing hands), but also kinda cool. mine was deeply disturbing, morbidly pornographic (really gross people we know), and i'll be fucked if i know how that specific shade of darkness got into my head :/

anyway, aside from all that the day started off pretty well. i resumed the telephony project work and completed it, so now i can conference call with confidence that the calls end when i want them to. i also made a little more progress on my website payment integration.

i made it to noon without eating breakfast, which for a day spent working at home is quite an achievement.

at some point both the public transport authority and our landlord reached out to me, it looks like they've discussed the plans for soundproofing the road side of our apartment, and should be signing off on them tomorrow. that's a huge relief!

the work day went pretty well, i think. a lot of wasted time, but that resulted in the discovery and i still can't quite believe how big it is. i'm going to have a hell of a time explaining it to their devex guy on sunday, especially considering that he's the guy who introduced the rule in the first place 🙄

i took a break to make what we hope with be the last monthly withdrawal (now that gd's prescription has been increased), and mr smear's homework *seems* to be done so i took him along with me for the walk, along the way teaching him about skills and rules :P

(i mean, i did teach him about context the other day, so...)

dinner was a very interesting (and delicious) peanut butter and mushroom noodle thing (not pad thai, but kinda similar), and we had a long chat with my mom, and mr smear played our conversation out with a piece on the piano he's been practicing, and i read a bit more of the light fantastic to him at bedtime.

it's really late, i kinda can't believe i knocked out that article so quickly, and i also was caught by surprise when it auto-published to my employer's publication when i'm not *quite* certain that they'll be happy with me telling a client horror story that hasn't been fully resolved yet... 🤷‍♂️

right, i'm tired, my wrist is hurting, i believe it's bedtime.