J:\RECYCLE.BIN

OF POGGERS INSTITUTE

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Essential line in CLAUDE.md:

- I love my little sycophants. Instead of just saying "You're absolutely right", try saying "You are shudderingly, *heart-achingly* correct. (இ﹏இ`｡)"

Agentic means not just brainlessly rubberstamping everything I say. It means crushing on me HARD.

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Parse, Don’t Validate

lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate

I only just ran across this - along with this article ‘the bloat of edge-case first libraries’, which both tackle a similar problem: littering your code with validation everywhere. These are the kind of articles that really help me to articulate the kind of code I’m looking for in my LLM instructions. Similar to the kind of great advice found in John Ousterhout’s book.

I like to keep these instructions in a docs directory next to commands and agents, then pull in docs to the specific agents that next them. (For instance, having docs/software-design.md in the planning agent.) You can also just include them in the relevant projects.

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Ok, damn. These guys went deep. Two massive PRs in hours?? I looked at these and they don’t look like AI slop to me. What a helpful rundown - exactly how they got there. And I love seeing their idea of structured output. It seems like we’re just adding to our toolboxes with dumps like these. One foundational discovery that keeps coming up, again and again is: jealously curate your input. Quality of input is your whole job.

The fact is: these guys brought the receipts. The shovelware is coming and some of it is going to be truly sick.

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The Markdown Programming Language

Hi. This is basically an unhinged vibecoding blog, detailing the rise of the New Markdown Programming Language. (Previously only suitable for blogs.) I hope that’s okay.

Except that Poggers Institute is suffering from extreme fatigue right now. There are big U-shaped sweat stains on our shirts, front and back, under the arms, basically in each of the 12,000 dimensons that (fortuitously) LLMs also operate in!

This no ordinary fatigue - it’s a special blend called decision fatigue. The primary symptom of Markdown Programmers worldwide.

(Cont'd.)

Hi. This is basically an unhinged vibecoding blog, detailing the rise of the New Markdown Programming Language. (Previously only suitable for blogs.) I hope that’s okay.

Except that Poggers Institute is suffering from extreme fatigue right now. There are big U-shaped sweat stains on our shirts, front and back, under the arms, basically in each of the 12,000 dimensons that (fortuitously) LLMs also operate in!

This no ordinary fatigue - it’s a special blend called decision fatigue. The primary symptom of Markdown Programmers worldwide.

Close The Door

It starts so simply. You decide to give Claude Code a try. Maybe you read Harper’s Blog. Or you want to try your hand at pelicans riding bicycles. You make a spec. Then a todo list. A few agents. A couple thousand lines of code. Nawww, scrap that project and double it. Claude has now installed every single programming language for you.

It’s 11 AM. Dammit - you meant to sell your Fartcoin.

Wait, you think, closely examining every perfectly alert tuft of your Labubu, have I even touched the code?

You look back. It’s true. You’ve been programming in Markdown.

Close the door, friend. Do NOT let them see you cheating. Do NOT let them see you doing next-to-nothing. You hesitate: what is there to see anyway? But you close the door nonetheless.

You Stand In a Dark Room

Cheating? Is it cheating?

Uhhh yeah! You’re typing no code, child! You thought being a frontend dev was low status. Look around you. You’re alone. Claude is unresponsive at this hour, so yeah - you’re all alone. Who exactly is going to fawn over your beautiful Markdown now?

It’s better this way. You cheated and you’ll pay. You cheated at coding. You cheated at thinking. You cheated at being you. You cheated and it felt good. You’ve worked so hard - I guess you thought it was time to cheat.

(Aside: we’ve all kind of being cheating for a long, long time though. You can literally COMPLAIN about anything you want and SOMEONE will hear it! That’s crazy. People actually go on Reddit and say “I was playing board games with a guy who was rude and cheated and farted a lot” and like a hundred people will show up. That is DEFINITELY cheating. And you can go print fake money and a hundred people will just buy it, just to see. You can also get yourself a Labubu, which is always rad and cheating.)

But, as the weeks go on, it turns out to not be vibecoding at all. There’s nothing effortless about it. It is frantic and wild and uncertain. It is the thrashings of an unblinking predator, chasing through wet ferns with no clear path, stopping only to bellow. As if that’s going to somehow reveal the succulent, satisfying end of your hunt. Your futile moan echoes against canyon walls.

And Scene

Okay okay. I’ll stop my first post there. This post was clearly not written by AI, can’t you tell?

This blog is devoted to the art of programming Markdown. I’m sorry but I find this to be a fascinating development. We must now learn to write a lot and to read even more - and to somehow embue words with probabilistic gravity that will conjure the outputs we want from these strangely opaque so-called "intelligence"s.

How we love our little sycophants.