There's a few obvious suggestions -- discuss design tradeoffs with the AI extensively, make sure you understand all your code, and understand the refactorings.

I think using Command Center can lead to much better skills growth than any other agentic coding environment. Which is a lot like saying that a shrubbery is much taller than grass, when you need your skills to grow into a tree.

This is a problem that no-one has solved. I think we might have it solved by the end of the year (we've been doing deals with a lot of universities and are being pulled in that direction),

The things humans can offer over AIs: product sense, greater context, taste. Of these, taste (really: software architecture and design) is the one that's most fundamentally about software engineering skill. I wrote recently about this at https://self-service.mirdin.com/software-design-in-the-age-o...

The big problem: it's very hard to develop enough taste to be a general without actually being in the trenches. This goes for pretty much any field, including literal war.

I've trained about 500 software engineers. But all of them were working professionals, who would take the training back on the job each week and see all the lessons playing out in their own and their coworker's code. If they were just chatting with AI and never having to get halfway through a big feature only to realize that the design was just fundamentally flawed, rate of growth would probably be much slower.

In short: lots you can do to grow faster than someone who just stares at the Claude CLI all day and never opens an editor. But how to become actually good while still doing AI coding? Unsolved problem.

Most days I don't ship 20 PRs. But I think my record is 30.

Three things made that possible.

The first, obviously, is having Command Center.

The second is that a lot of those were fixes or UX improvements under 100 lines.

The third is, no joke, not sleeping. I've had quite a few 20+ hour days in the last 6 months. Some of that is work pressure, but also I've considered getting evaluated for a broken circadian rhythm.

> I'd be curious to see some of those PRs if you're saying you've essentially solved the holy paradox of "ship fast = shit code" or "ship slow = good code".

If you're serious, I'll be happy to get on a call and show you.

Thanks for explaining, I still have my doubts about the actual quality, but I'm also I'm also very open to be proven wrong! It has happened before, bound to happen again at some point or another :)

> but also I've considered getting evaluated for a broken circadian rhythm.

Heh, personally I fixed this by just adopting the sleep cycle my body wants of going to bed at 04:00/05:00 and going up at 11:00/12:00, life is much better now when I just accept it. One approach if your life can allow it :)

> If you're serious, I'll be happy to get on a call and show you.

Very much so, obviously prefer something async if possible, just a .patch file could suffice I suppose, but could do a call to have a look if that's the only way :) Reach out to my email from my profile and we can coordinate :)

> Heh, personally I fixed this by just adopting the sleep cycle my body wants of going to bed at 04:00/05:00 and going up at 11:00/12:00, life is much better now when I just accept it. One approach if your life can allow it :)

That was my life in my mid-late 20's.

But as I've gotten older, my sleep schedule has only gotten more messed up. Now I consider it a victory if I manage to go to sleep before the dawn.

> Very much so, obviously prefer something async if possible, just a .patch file could suffice I suppose, but could do a call to have a look if that's the only way :) Reach out to my email from my profile and we can coordinate :)

Cool, let's chat async then. Contacting you now.

Hi Fizzadar,

On the one hand, it is true that the website code was pushed 0 minutes before this announcement went up.

On the other hand, I tested just now on two different phones and didn't see any issues. Can you say in more detail what you expected vs. what actually happened?

There was an occlusion issue on some smaller screens, but it's been fixed now.

Thanks!

The final moments before this launch announcement consisted of me twiddling my thumbs while waiting for our designer to upload any version he could get ready in time that is better than the previous version of our website. So we knew we'd be launching with a lot of imperfections in the visuals. Did test in mobile, but not on iPad.

In fairness, I did most of these interviews last summer, and I know some people have changed. And while I did go a fair bit outside my network to interview people, there are all sorts of hard-to-understand selection effects that come from me being me. A 21 year-old frat boy who tried doing the same kind of interviewing with the people he could find to interview would probably get different results.

But yes, that is indeed what happened. Multiple times, I'd talk to someone that I'd expect to not be reading the code at all (solo founder, mostly nontechnical), then I'd interview him in detail about his workflow and think "Huh, there was absolutely no point in there where he was reading stuff," and then I'd ask "So how much of your time is reading code?" "60, maybe 70%"

We have a referrer program

Doug has not signed up for it.

And indeed, I think we're the only agentic coding environment with jj support.

The most difficult code in the 1.0 release is some gymnastics to avoid the appearance of a concurrency conflict with a user running their own jj commands, made at the request of the person who introduced me to jj.

Ooh. The answer is probably more interesting and philosophical than you expected

I can tell you that we do extensive testing, we figured out how to objectively measure the code quality on certain benchmark problems, empirically it's extremely helpful nearly all the time.

But in the general case: it is not actually possible to guarantee this.

That's because whether a change improves the code often depends on information which is literally not present in the codebase.

Some of these are more trite. E.g.: whether a comment is helpful or redundant slop depends on the audience.

Some are deeper. E.g.: whether a piece of duplication is good or bad depends on the intent, and that is often impossible to recover from the source. https://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/01/the-design-of-software...

A simpler example: There's a function that's never called. Should it be deleted?

There's a number of factors outside the codebase that determine the answer. Including the obvious one "Not if your next prompt is going to start using it."

You found a way to objectively measure code quality?? Sell that! Why even sell this course when you have the ability to literally beat every software company?

In honesty, that's not a bad idea, and we hadn't thought of that.

It's pretty expensive to measure even for small programs. It's also more of a relative than an absolute measure, i.e.: it scores two variants of the same codebase, but the raw scores aren't very meaningful on their own. So our goal had been to use this in the benchmark set we're working on when we release a standalone refactoring product.

But the more I think about this suggestion, the more I think: "Hmmm, why not?"

I started playing didgeridoo 10 years ago for precisely this reason. Sleep apnea already cured by weight loss, but I knew by air pathways were prone to it, and I never wanted it to come back.

It worked

It took me 1-2 years to learn circular breathing, but even just learning to play for 15 seconds on one breath can give the "oxygen high" from breathing so much.

You can't get "oxygen high" from breathing normal air. The O2 levels will always stay the same unless you stop breathing for a while. What will make you feel weird in the head when breathing too fast is the reduction of CO2 in your blood.

So, if you breathe in an intensive manner for a few minutes, oxygen percentage in the blood won't change?

One a friend and I hooked ourselves up to continuous pulse oximetry and had a contest to get the lowest recorded oxygen level. We tried everything we could think of, from just holding our breath to end-expiratory breath holding to hyperventilating to clear O2 (I used to do some recreational free-diving) beforehand to exercising (jumping jacks)...

Neither of us could get it below 98%, and this was at a mile of elevation (UNMH in Albuquerque).

It is pretty easy if you use the Wim Hof method. Breathe deep and fast for a few minutes, to the point where you get dizzy or feel weird sensations. Then exhale and stop breathing while being fully relaxed. I've done this while hooked to a pulse oximeter and it takes quite a while before O2 actually starts dropping (especially because the effect can be delayed in your limbs), but once it starts you'll pretty quickly run into the regime where a normal oxi will start an alarm because O2 is too low. You can even go below 85% without losing consciousness, because your limbs will desaturate faster than your brain. It's also not uncomfortable, because rising CO2 is what causes breathing reflex, but you dropped its levels far below the threshold by hyperventilating first.

Interesting. As I noted above (though typo O2 -> CO2), I used the same technique you describe, which I learned in free diving, and was not able to get below 98%, at altitude.

I'm quite sure no freediving instructor would ever teach you this particular method, because it is a surefire way to die underwater on your first attempt. Free diving breathing techniques usually revolve around lowering your heart rate, not lowering CO2. Wim Hof trainers will also tell you to never to use this method when near water.

As for the specifics that may have prevented you from doing what you wanted: If you breathe too shallow or too slow, you won't clear enough CO2. In freediving this is normal (even wanted), but for Wim Hof practice it means you didn't do it right. You really have to breathe so deep and fast that you enter an uncomfortable zone. It's not unlike physical exercise, except it's mostly mental.

> I'm quite sure no freediving instructor would ever teach you this particular method, because it is a surefire way to die underwater on your first attempt

Definitely no instructor involved, just a dumb 20 year-old living in Puerto Rico. It admittedly was dangerous, but I am living evidence that it was far from a "surefire" way to die. It was one of a hundred ways in which I put my life at risk during my 20s. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> As for the specifics that may have prevented you from doing what you wanted: If you breathe too shallow or too slow, you won't clear enough CO2.

I'm confident I was doing it sufficiently well to accomplish a longer period of breath holding than I otherwise would have been able to sustain, as evidenced by having done so (in addition to the usual symptoms of lightheadedness, confusion, loss of vision, near-syncope -- yes I agree quite uncomfortable). I know people on HN love to idolize Wim Hof, but in this context minute ventilation is not that difficult of a concept; I'm usually able to estimate the response in a paralyzed patient's PCO2 fairly well when making changes to their tidal volume and rate.

I didn't search for too long, but here's at least one relevant document, in which otherwise untrained subjects were able to achieve a substantial reduction in CO2 (17.4 vs 29.0) with a mere 15 seconds of hyperventilation, leading to an extra 23 seconds of breath holding prior to involuntary breathing moments. The peripheral O2 sat nadir in the hyperventilation group appears to have been identical to the non-hyperventilation group after the first trial (Fig 8b, looks like ~94%) and was only statistically significantly lower on trials 2-5: <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10363065/>

90 seconds of breath hold is still way too little to see oxygen drops in a finger pulse oxi. Also explains why you didn't die free-diving. Even with no training you can go much longer than that before risking a blackout (at least under normal circumstances). In fact training free-diving is all about CO2 tolerance and relaxation, so you won't even be able to store more O2. When I was reaching the 80s, I was doing 3+ minute breath holds. The first ~2 minutes my oxi stayed at full O2 sat with basically no change. In principle you should be able to induce a blackout yourself using this method without feeling an urgent need to breathe - if you do the prep stage hard enough. Just make sure you only do this when lying down in a safe position.

I got a pulse oximeter during COVID and was able to get my O2 levels to spike down to 64% using Wim Hof breathing (for less than a second, ofc).

This was using equipment in the emergency department of our state's only L1 trauma center and comprehensive stroke center; I presume it was decent as far as medical monitoring equipment goes.

If you've ever done the wim hof breathing method, it is a very intense experience.

Basically hyperventilation + long breath holds. Probably similar to what free divers do without the mammalian dive reflex due to the cold water. Or like a dangerous game kids used to do when I was in school where you hyperventilate and then have someone press on your chest until you pass out.

But anyway, I'm not sure if the science would back it up, but Wim Hof describes it as over oxygenating the blood and then stopping and letting CO2 ramp up or something. Whether it is significantly dropping the CO2 or increasing oxygen during the hyperventilation phase, isn't it kind of the same thing? Adjusting the ratio.

Anecdotally, when I was doing it regularly I seemed to not get sick at all.

Blood oxygen saturation is always near 100% in a healthy person. 95% is the low end of normal. Dropping to 90% is considered hypoxemia, and 80% is a medical emergency. So there really shouldn’t be any room to increase it significantly.

In many people a momentary drop to the 80s or even below is not an emergency or anything close to it. Not saying that it is good. Someone that is awake, sitting up, and struggling to breathe should be considered an emergency regardless of oxygen levels (and in this situation 80% would be very concerning).

EDIT: your comment is otherwise entirely correct, particularly at sea level.

90% you should really be traveling to see someone. At least an urgent care, if not an ER.

No it would stay at pretty much 100% (as is normal). But co2 goes down, which lessens the ability of oxygen to come out of the blood. That's why you get dizzy when hyperventilating

Nope. The blood is already fully saturated with oxygen (in a healthy-ish person) at rest. Even intensely breathing pure o2 can't give you a saturation higher than 100%.