iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Guerrera

@nguerrera.dev

627 followers 328 following 605 posts

Independent Software Engineer. Ex-Microsoft. technogenic.net

Posts Replies Media

Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 29/09/2026

You keep using that word "config", but I don't think it means what you think it means.

Screenshot from qdirstat showing ~/.config taking 19.8 GB, 13.8 GB for Claude, 2.6 GB for Code, 1.4 GB for microsoft-edge, 1.3 GB for Sidra, 713.2 MB for discord, and 145.7 MB for Codex.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 28/08/2026

Which Microsoft Edge do I want. Computers were a mistake.

Drop-down to select default browser showing ChatGPT, Microsoft Edge, or Microsoft Edge a second time.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 28/08/2026

This is after quitting the app and restarting it upon the very first click on the sign-in button. Amazing work!

Error message in ChatGPT app "Sign-in failed: A ChatGPT login is already in progress"

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 28/08/2026

Well, the GPT trial is not going well. ChatGPT app registered itself as my default browser on Linux (!?!) and just hangs and cannot login. Can we please demonstrate the ability to make software that isn't broken in ridiculous ways before talking about AGI or superintelligence, humanoid robots, etc.?

Default Apps in GNOME showing ChatGPT as browser. I didn't do that, the ChatGPT install did!

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 28/08/2026

Peanuts, but more to come when I get some income back.

Invoice for new $10/mo recurring donation to GNOME Foundation.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 28/08/2026

Claude Fable 5, folks. Upgraded $100/mo -> $200/mo so I could use it after Opus 5 drove me nuts with this. Attempting GPT/Codex next.

❯ I'm curious, why was 212 opened undrafted? Did something about the guidance mislead you?

● No — the guidance is clear and I just failed to follow it. ~/.agents/AGENTS.md says to open the pull request when the work starts, as a draft, and push to it freely. I did the opposite on both counts: opened it at the end, ready. Nothing in the files pointed that way; the miss is that I treated "push branch, open PR" as a finishing step out of habit instead of re-reading the flow I was executing.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 26/08/2026

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 22/08/2026

Tried 3 more ways to contact italki, all dead ends. Then I go to leave a scathing trust pilot review but

Error “Something went wrong on our end. Please try again.” On trustpilot app searching for italki.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 22/08/2026

Internet upgraded. If you showed teenage me in the late 90s this and ChatGPT, I'm not sure which he would think was faker.

Speed test showing 2Gbps down and 2 Gbps up, 1 ms ping.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 21/08/2026

Secret #5: Keep it healthy and you will have far fewer weeds, even without chemicals. The back isn’t treated at all so that Winston can roam free and it’s still looks pretty good.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 21/08/2026

Five years ago, we bought our first house and the grass was mostly dead. I went on a hobby side quest, bringing it back to life and into to the current maintenance phase. Strangers now ask my wife and I for lawncare secrets. I will now share some here. Also meet Winston, the best boy!

A picture of our golden doodle Winston on our front porch with the front lawn in view.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 17/08/2026

Software Engineering isn’t solved until this stops being a thing that can happen.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 16/08/2026

Posts on x.com by me:

Long time. On the off chance that you miss my rambling, I’ve been posting heavily on BlueSky. Get over there already! (I was never here.)

—

Also I’m judging you a little bit for still being here. But all is forgiven if you go over to bsky, follow me and throw down some likes. 🤣

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 14/08/2026

Getting a better handle on the writing that annoys me most. And, umm, it's not just that it sounds like AI, it's that it's genuinely harder to read. 😉

**The trailing clause that re-labels the sentence instead of adding to it.** It usually opens `which is`, `rather than`, or `that is the`, and it arrives after the sentence has already landed.

These are real, all of them written into #133 and cut from it. They are here as the shape to hunt rather than as an inventory:

- "What it buys is the defect list arriving somewhere that can absorb it, **which is the point rather than a proxy for the next build**."
- "it sits at the top of that ordering **by role rather than by estimate**"
- "worth doing to a laptop that works fine as it is, **which is not true of a machine that stays on a desk**"
- "The hydrated subset goes at the same erase, **which is the other half of the same argument**."
- "has a lock screen and BitLocker in front of it, **which is the difference the rule is about**"
- "LUKS is a condition of that build **rather than something to arrange afterwards**"
- "the same build as the erase above **rather than a second occasion**"
- "the cloud is settled by the VPN decision **rather than a preference**"
- "**What it costs is stated rather than worked around.**" -- a sentence about the note instead of about its subject.
- "**What travels is what the trip is for.**" -- an aphorism restating the sentence above it.
- "Nothing forces a future name into that structure; **it is what the set already says**."

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 13/08/2026

Don't make me do it.

Hypothetical Claude Code prompt:

> Make me an iOS app that sits in front of bsky.app and works exactly like it. Indistinguishable from it in every way but one: everything I post has a ten minute window where I can edit or delete what I wrote before it is ever sent to bsky.app. NO MISTAKES.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 13/08/2026

For all the talk of Apple’s design prowess, this button is in the worst possible place and so easy to hit by mistake. Why is every word squiggled as though spelled incorrectly? Oh, shit, strikes again! 😡

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 12/08/2026

Some days I can't get enough of Claude and some days:

Go back through the history of AGENTS.md. At one point I asked a different model to make it briefer then it slowly drifted back to being long-winded. There is something fundamental about your model that reaches for more words than necessary constantly. I want to make it brief again and I want to find a way to make it stay brief this time. Lead with the rules for skills and guidance. They are instructions for agents to follow. They do not need defending. Keep it to what the AGENT needs to do as we want. According to the last session, in AI-ish language, the last Claude said "Worth carrying into that session: the four trims here weren't wording, they were one habit — clauses that answer objections nobody raised, each one reopening what the rule above it closed. If that's the dominant defect across the corpus, the pass is mostly deletion rather than rewriting, which makes it faster than it looks and easier to check." Do you see how unlike my writing that is. "The dominant defect across the corpus". "Across the corpus" is filler slop, for example. I'm being more direct than usual here since this never seems to land. Once you have a sense for what's wrong rewrite every AGENTS.*.md CLAUDE.*.md and SKILL.md to be in a briefer, more human, more direct register.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 10/08/2026

But here's a preview of how detailed my notes are for the first time in my life and it's exhilirating.

A screenshot of markdown notes about a machine I own, rendered by GitHub's preview. The markdown excerpt was also placed at https://gist.github.com/nguerrera/bfb42512eef1ea49c98bab258a2514d6 rather than inline here since there is a limit on ALT text length.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 08/08/2026

This is a picture of Claude Opus 5 after being told to file a bug to investigate later when a segmentation fault in a tool we don’t own got in the way of an auxiliary command. It wanted so badly to root cause it and file upstream NOW. Honestly, relatable.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 24/01/2025

And... it's back! 😩

Screenshot showing Microsoft 365 Copilot pinned to Windows 11 taskbar, offering option to unpin from task bar. Next to that, settings app is open to Apps > Startup page and Microsoft 365 Copilot is turned off.

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Nick Guerrera @nguerrera.dev · 28/11/2024

Working on something.

Screenshot of the following C# code:

#if NET472
// The sleeping will continue until morale improves
var net472Release = new DateTimeOffset(2018, 4, 30, 0, 0, 0, TimeSpan.Zero);
var timeSinceNet472 = DateTimeOffset.UtcNow - net472Release;
var daysSinceNet472 = (int)(timeSinceNet472.TotalDays);
Thread.Sleep(daysSinceNet472);
#endif

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