What Your Coding Tool Says About You

Waylon Walker Author

Jan 21, 2026 1 min read

open code - libre free as in beer and speech
Copilot - corporate 9-5er
Cursor - You sip on Philz coffee with your macbook
Claude Code - Agentic Workflows or Bust
Jetbrains - I didn’t know you wrote java
Vim/neovim - definite neck beard
VsCode - What else is there?

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Latest Thoughts #

💭 Hybrid theory is the greatest album of our generation - YouTube

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Jaime’s title hooked me in here, what guitar riff from Linkin Park had the greatest riff of our generation. Theres something about Linkin Park unlike Killswitch Engage, Atreyu, Avenged Sevenfold, bands I would listen to at this time that I cant remember a single riff, I can think of Chesters vocals, or the unique scratching they did, but mostly the songs were a whole piece. What riff is he talking about.

The very first note of “One Step Closer” plays and I’m immediately transported back to 2003 sitting in my garage watching HuevosIII on repeat. I can still remember the timing that Wes Miller did on the edit. I can see the riders I looked up to for so long riding in formation.

Turns out this riff is so recognizable it takes me exactly where I was when I listened to it hundreds of times.

💭 Super Slow-Moto: The

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The most iconic shots of a scrub ever caught on camera.

💭 "Am I Crazy?" [Wading Through AI - Episode 3]

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Casey had an interesting point here. I think demitri came back with some sense of sanity that its just not how corporations look at employee cost, but I still thought it was a head scratcher.

Roughly translated not quoted

If the sellers of ai are telling you that your developers are going to be 10x productive, why are they only spending half their salary in tokens? Why not 9x?

💭 A love letter to Pi | Lucas Meijer

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I hate how he called out terminal user interfaces as shit… then proved web interfaces to be superior. Damn him. I love working from my terminal, but having ai prove itself through html reports including video, image, metrics, charts, and text is goated. Rethinking yourself has the bottleneck not the orchestrator feels real. Validating the work is hard, theres a shift right now and everyone is trying to figure it out. Lucas’s technique is a little bit of be lazy and tell it to prove itself to you, so as you juggle your 15 agents you have a nice report to read.

💭 How Claude Code’s Creator Starts EVERY Project - YouTube

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This is a really good guide, with quite a few good nuggets. I need to try deleting my AGENTS.md and rebuilding it from scratch more often. I liked how he talked about having agents prove their work and tell them up front how they will be judged. What I didn’t care for so much was the feeling that a lot of the rules go in markdown, thats not a rule, thats a suggestion. Rules should be deterministic. They should be tests and linters that ensure they are followed. Suggestions are good, but dont trust the agents to always follow them. And don’t trust that they wont change your rules, keep them honest.

Recent Pings #

Can You Feel the Slop #

Do you ever vibe code out a POC, and you can just feel the shitty code underneath? Every change causes 3 things to break and wires get crossed all over the place. Sometimes I just want to write the code again. Maybe its time to slow down.

approve rm #

Hot take, if you are unwilling to approve rm you should rethink your workflow, git state, or backups.

Note

This is meant for normal project work with an agent working in the context of a single project, with directory level access to the project.

Ping 54 #

I'm regressing back to boomer ai for more plan mode style prompting at home... It does a decent job at ingesting a repo and coming up with plans before I start spending precious tokens.

Tokens Just don't go as far as they used to #

Not sure if this is simply the flavor of the month, or a shift in gpt5.4 being super subsidized on release and now that we have gpt5.4-mini-fast out they have shifted, but I'm burning through half of my $20 gippity sub in a day with hobby level use. Second week in a row its burning so fast.

Ping 52 #

Is it just me or are the agents not behaving today?

`j`	Scroll down
`k`	Scroll up
`g` `g`	Scroll to top
`Shift` `G`	Scroll to bottom
`d`	Half-page down
`u`	Half-page up

`j` / `↓`	Next post (in feeds)
`k` / `↑`	Previous post (in feeds)
`Enter` / `o`	Open highlighted post
`Shift` `O`	Open in new tab
`g` `h`	Go to home
`g` `s`	Focus search
`[`	Previous page
`]`	Next page
`s`	Toggle simple/rich feed view

`/`	Focus search input
`⌘CtrlK`	Focus search (alternative)
`y` `y`	Copy URL to clipboard
`?`	Show this help
`Esc`	Close / clear highlight

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