Hammock Oriented Development

It would probably be a point of contention the main way I’ve been working on Clojurust recently: that a lot of the coding is done by Claude Code, with less and less of my own direct involvement. I’m not interested in defending doing this kind of development, and I’m not any kind of ASI-is-inevitable super-booster. What I wanted to do is describe how I’m using AI coding tools in this instance, why it’s neat and how it falls short.

Most of the work I do on this project happens when I have a little free time, which is extremely small amounts at the end of the workday, since my home life is preoccupied with my four children. I just don’t have much opportunity to sit at a computer and work on this code anymore. So I have Claude do some work while I’m pushing kids on a swing, or am cooking dinner, or I set up a task as I start driving home from work.

Would I do a better job with my hands more deep in the code? Would I learn way more about compilers, garbage collection, and memory management than I currently do, which is very high level? One thousand percent yes to both of those. Could I do much work on this at all with the little time I can spend on my iPhone between Dad work? No way.

It’s extremely neat that I can do work on this stuff at all, given the low-res viewport I have to all of this, but I also can tell you that this current interface, of typing terse English description into a chatbot, hoping that it does something reasonable, and looking in horror when I see what shortcuts it decided to take. There is a better interface to this than what we have now. I’m not sure what that is, but this ain’t it.

Zeta

I have enjoyed playing around with cljrs and seeing what’s possible to do with it. The latest thing I’ve tried is a website that lets you play around with the Riemann Zeta function. It’s a beautiful, intriguing function to play around with, because it very likely has

Wave

I went and created a tiny HTTP-fetching Clojure program called wave (see, it’s like a curl…) that fetches URLs given on the command line and dumps the results to the console. It can do HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3. It works interpreted and as an

Stressed

I had put together a stress test of Clojurust, which just runs all the tests currently in the repo, both under AOT compilation and the direct interpreter/JIT path. Some recent interpreter GC-rooting fixes landed, and the stress test just had its first successful run. It's a

And honey, us the fable

So there was a brief period where I had Fable access, and it was at the same time incredible, frustrating, and expensive. When I use Claude Code, I like to have it write a clear plan about the big picture I want to tackle, and once that’s done and

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Zeta

Wave

Stressed

And honey, us the fable