iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 19/06/2025

Absolutely — it's not nearly as difficult as it sounds! I'm still learning and probably doing lots wrong myself 😅

Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 19/06/2025

Claude Code has blown my fucking mind this week. Huge unlocks: - MCP: Puppeteer, Postgres, Linear - Tweaking CLAUDE.md - Adding CLAUDE.md to subdirectories (i.e. tests) - Claude commands - Github CLI I am all-in on this.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 13/06/2025

Was gonna jump in and say the same thing. I’d been leaning towards focusing more on React purely to get more mileage out of AI tools, but the latest round of tools seems to have gotten a lot better with the “traditional” Rails stack.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 07/06/2025

Man, I’ve been programming for ~20 years and I felt like that this week too.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 05/06/2025

Imagine that scene from Pulp Fiction with “PARDON ME?” instead of “WHAT?”

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 28/05/2025

It's baffling that Uber sends me alerts about cheap rides, as if I'm just waiting to go on a random car ride with a stranger and my only hangup is price.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 28/05/2025

There are a handful of apps I need push notifications from that ALSO send me marketing push notifications, but don't give me a way to disable *only* the marketing notifications. These apps know I'm not going to disable push notifications completely, so they spam me with impunity.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 28/05/2025

Apple needs a way to report push notifications as spam on iOS.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 15/05/2025

Whatever generation came before boomers.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 10/05/2025

Oh don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a love story about partials & helpers 🤣 haven’t tried phlex but have been meaning to for exactly this reason. One file, one language.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 09/05/2025

ViewComponents feel similar to abstracted CSS because I can't just look at a ViewComponent and understand exactly what it's doing. Which (like abstracted CSS) is fine for simple things but can quickly become unwieldy. No idea if this makes sense, I'm on a lot of cold medication at the moment 🤣

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 09/05/2025

Working with abstracted CSS (i.e. class names for components) increases cognitive load because I often have to think about the required DOM structure (usually referencing an existing example), how the CSS actually works, and how changes to the CSS could cascade to (and break) other parts of the app.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 09/05/2025

It reminds me a lot of abstracting styling with CSS vs using Tailwind utility classes. Tailwind is appealing to me because it colocates markup + styling. You can look at a chunk of HTML and know exactly what it's doing. It may look messy, but I never have to go find & reverse engineer other files.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 09/05/2025

Honestly it's actually not bad, I'm exaggerating 😊 It's a super well-built library that solves a painful problem well. I actually love it for many things. But like all abstractions, it introduces another layer between the programmer.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 09/05/2025

I think I hate ViewComponents 🤔 #rails

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 06/05/2025

How much collective human energy has been wasted redesigning custom checkboxes, radio buttons, selects, etc. that function WORSE than native browser defaults?

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 02/05/2025

Tip: If you add it to your cart and then leave the website, they might email you a coupon.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 16/04/2025

After ~20 years of writing code, I'm convinced that literally the ONLY metric that matters for code quality is: How easy is it to change? Copypasta is freedom, abstractions are cement shoes.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 11/04/2025

- Reference: faster than looking through API docs - Cleanup: "Make this code more idiomatic and concise, using the latest libraries" - Brainstorming: "I need to do <thing>, I have ideas <a, b, c>, help me evaluate them and suggest alternatives" - Troubleshooting: "why isn't this code working?"

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 11/04/2025

For the time being I've given up on agentic coding. Seems like no matter which model or tool I use, and no matter how much I finesse prompts — it just generates a frustrating mess more often than not. That said, I still constantly use AI as a coding sidekick for stuff like:

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 11/04/2025

At least they didn't start the headline with "Hard-hitting daily"

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 06/04/2025

well it’s Sunday morning and these Hydraulic Press videos aren’t going to watch themselves

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 02/04/2025

Yeah, it's great for this. BTW, maybe you already know this but in case not: if you're using VS Code, ChatGPT can automatically read your open editor tabs if you allow it. (I'm sure you can do this with other editors too).

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 31/03/2025

This frame from a @github.com Copilot tutorial video really captures the essence of the Copilot experience.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 19/03/2025

It's like 30 seconds of this prelude garbage before I can even type out my issue!

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 19/03/2025

Hello! (fake typing) My name is Sam! (fake typing) Hope you're having a great day! (fake typing) First, let's find out more about you! (fake typing) What's your name? (fake typing) Great to meet you! (fake typing) Now, what's your email address? (fake typing) How can I help you today?

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 19/03/2025

I'm at the point where AI chat bots send me into a blinding rage, anyone else?

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 02/03/2025

I know you're a Rails enthusiast, so this tracks 🥁

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 26/02/2025

I can understand this point of view, but the same thing has happened to the entire computing stack over time. Complexity is abstracted and built upon. Right now it feels scary only because we're in a transitory state and AI isn't fully reliable.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 21/02/2025

I just about missed it, my TV decided to do this with ~3 minutes left in the game.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 20/02/2025

Really curious to know: what AI coding tool are you *primarily* using for real work? - Copilot - Cursor - Windsurf - Cline - Roo Code - Aider I keep bouncing between tools because they're all changing and improving so rapidly 😅

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 19/02/2025

You're being generous calling it a "financial asset" 🤭

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 17/02/2025

That's the most fun Nirvana album.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 15/02/2025

Still trying to determine if AI-assisted coding is a net gain or a net loss 🤔

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 03/02/2025

This isn’t a trade war, it’s a currency war.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 01/02/2025

the trick is to say "it will be finished on Wednesday" but never specify *which* Wednesday

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 31/01/2025

My 3yo daughter crashed our weekly dev meeting and now she won't stop saying "fucking paypal..."

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 28/01/2025

When’s the $DOUGCOIN air drop?

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 27/01/2025

Gmail's spam filtering has become awful. I get multiple obvious spam messages like this to my inbox every day now. So happy that I'm just about finished migrating to fastmail.com 🙏

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 16/01/2025

I've spent today troubleshooting random VSCode errors, a suddenly broken local development environment, hung CI builds, timeouts in staging environment... ...seems like a good day to buy a laundromat and a bunch of vending machines 💡

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 08/01/2025

I find Google's products super confusing, to be honest, and a hassle to work with. I think net-net I lose time trying to use them!

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 08/01/2025

I haven't used Fastmail within the context of a company (yet), I've only used it personally. But if I ever do, I'll figure out how to make it work with Fastmail and other non-Google tools.

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Kyle Fox @kylefox.com · 08/01/2025