Ólafur Páll Geirsson

Current status

The best mental model for buying strollers is to think of renting them by the month. The resale value holds pretty high so the final cost isn’t so bad even for the $2k premium twin strollers.

The usual answer is “no” whenever people ask whether LSP can be used in a novel way. The protocol’s strength is also its weakness, it’s very much optimized around a single human user interacting with an IDE.

Three kids done with chickenpox this month.

Amp Tab is coming along nicely, it's not too far from being able to replace Cursor Tab as my daily driver.

After starting working on Amp (ampcode.com ): - No meetings - No code review, just push to main - Take responsibility for your changes - Rarely need to create a branch off main - Auto-release every few hours - Prioritize user bug reports whenever possible

At the risk of being pedantic, when many people say “one shot” the actually mean zero shot pass@1. Technically, one shot means including one example output in the prompt, and most prompts don’t do that. Not blaming, I even catch myself saying one shot meaning pass@1.

git worktrees are overrated, they're a performance optimization that only makes sense when working in a repo that's super slow to clone. For normal repos, just clone twice and enjoy benefits like being able to check out the main branch in both clones at the same time.

Sprinkling Copilot dependencies across the VS Code codebase is a great technique to make it more annoying to keep a fork up-to-date. Well played, Microsoft.

Got o3 to think for a record-breaking amount of time (4m54s) with this prompt. “How many songs in the Eurovision finals are in English? I have a feeling there are unusually few this year.” It enumerated the songs and classified the lyrics, very cool. Answer was 11 out of 26 songs were in English.

It’s naive to believe that tech companies are slowing down hiring due to AI productivity gains. Only a small fraction of people in tech work on projects with meaningful revenue generation, and it’s a better investment to buy GPUs for the winning projects than to employ people for losing projects.

Move to a place where neighbors randomly invite you to enjoy freshly baked cinnamon buns on a Thursday morning

I once sent an email with some copy-pasted text from ChatGPT and realized afterwards you can tell from the HTML formatting. I’m still embarrassed by this.

OpenAI and Microsoft must have a sour relationship when OpenAI acquires a VS Code fork to compete against Copilot.

Date-based versioning is underused. I love how JetBrains IDEs have easy to remember versions like 2019.3. Meanwhile, we have Gemini Pro 2.5 Experimental (New).

Feature request: testing library that automatically re-runs new tests N times to catch flakes.

Highly recommend using o3 to geoguess screenshots of random images from your personal photo library. It's been off by ~30km on the two examples I've tried so far.

Apple buying Anthropic would make a lot of sense. Strong win-win vibes.

It feels very good being able to develop on the main branch and pushing straight to origin. No branching, no PR. Every dev should try to at least experience this.

Nix is so appealing on the surface but I always get turned off quickly after trying to use it. I get maybe 98% of the benefits via mise/direnv with none of the complexity. I must be missing something.

ArkType is absolute TypeScript sorcery. Very glad to see a strong zod competitor enter the market of runtime validation with a focus on performance and developer ergonomics. Runtime validation has always been a weak spot in the JS ecosystem, and ArkType might just fix that important gap for me.

Maybe file-based issue tracking will have a comeback with agents checking off their TODOs. Wiring OAuth to something like JIRA/Linear feels heavy-weight when the files are just lying there and LLMs are good at editing files.

First day today working with git-branchless. It takes some time getting used to, but I can already see how this workflow is greatly superior to the manual branch+rebase workflow that I've been using for years.

Conventional wisdom says don’t do a rewrite, but I think we’re going to see many success stories of huge rewrites over the next years.

I can’t believe I’m saying this but the world needs a new multiplayer AI chat application. Slack and Discord don’t cut it for me.

Feels like a ticking timebomb that the tech industry is seemingly moving towards monorepos and git does not scale well beyond the size of Linux. I speculate Mercurial will have a comeback. Reading up on Mercurial and it has a lot going for it compared to git in common scenarios like rebasing.

tig is very good for working with git locally, highly recommend. Triggered because I just discovered the [] shortcuts to expand the context lines in the diff view, which you can't do via the git cli

Hitting o3 limits with ChatGPT Plus, and consider getting a second Plus account instead of upgrading to the 10x more expensive Pro

I’m liking the vibes of o3, and it seems less biased by the non-optional web searches compared to past models.

I love reading up on modern CSS features. Need more practice putting this knowledge to use.