iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 30/09/2026

I am investigating, I will let you know when I know!

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 29/09/2026

Finally catching up on the Mercurial talk I missed at Git Merge. The data model seems very elegant and intuitive. Topics sound a little like how I have envisioned reviewing and merging (sub)sets of changes, a bit closer to Gerrit.

Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 29/09/2026

Finally Frankensteined my AC into being smart-ish with an IR blaster, just in time for winter.

Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 15/09/2026

Linear’s mobile app emulates Liquid Glass in the bottom navigation rather than using the real thing. It’s icky.

Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 14/09/2026

iOS 27 and friends are about to drop. I’ve been running the betas since the early developer releases. This is the smoothest and most reliable the operating systems have felt since I adopted the ecosystem five years ago. I wish every release would balance features and polish like this.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 12/09/2026

Astra has generated some truly trash code for me this week. It does feel as though they’re optimising for replacing SWEs in order to facilitate cheap technically-functional junk, rather than enhancing SWEs to produce better output faster. Better lock-in that way too.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 08/09/2026

Likewise for me around that time, when folks I respected like Mitchell Hashimoto started talking about it without the hyperbole.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 07/09/2026

Not sure I can remember Sol/previous being as gracious as Astra here after multiple rounds of disagreement. (Yes I know I'm anthropomorphising too much.)

Chat with GPT-6 Astra says "I withdraw item 1 as an architectural criticism" in bold.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 01/09/2026

It's real nice when debugging libraries to have your agent spin up an ephemeral single-file HTML repro that even renders in-app.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 30/08/2026

It does! Alas I don’t have the energy or motivation for blog posts at the moment. AI having poisoned the well probably isn’t helping. I can answer any questions you might have though. 🙂

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 29/08/2026

I’m one of them! 👋 Thank you!

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 28/08/2026

I don’t really live in the terminal any more, but anyone currently feeling disillusioned with Neovim should try Helix. Break free from the Vi family!

Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 27/08/2026

This is actually huge to know, thank you!

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 27/08/2026

I’m fond of flatMap (returning T | []) as a poor man’s filterMap. 🙈

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 24/08/2026

It took me nearly a decade but I’ve finally learned how to forage and start a fire in DayZ. I am however now fighting off illness from eating baked wolf steaks. The game is oddly serene.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 20/08/2026

Like ripping obscure CDs nobody ever asked for.

Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 19/08/2026

The Codex Remote -> push to iPhone over WiFi setup I have going is very effective for simple apps. I can do it all from my phone. I don’t know why we have Image Playground and not something to generate apps instead, in the spirit of Glaze. I suppose generating WebExtensions is the first step.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 18/08/2026

Has anyone ever gone through something architectural with Codex without it saying "seam"?

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That’s what saving for later is for! I miss it on Discord.

It does resemble a slot machine though. I didn’t rest as much as I should have yesterday. 😬

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For example: - iOS app to locally download high res images from Instagram (wallpapers) - iOS app to scrape the Ally Pally website to see what’s on *today* - Menu bar stats which is more focused on what I want and so far less buggy than what I was using before

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 16/08/2026

🙈 Yesterday I got a monorepo going for personal macOS and iOS apps. I can remote into my Mac with ChatGPT and push apps to my iPhone if I’m on the same WiFi network. It can live debug too. Given some Swift skills it works really well for personal apps of limited scope.

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Codex can spin up a working iOS dev loop (remote, even!). Codex cannot get simple links to work within a Swift app. Flashbacks to attempting macOS dev a few months ago. Maybe the path of least resistance is React Native.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 16/08/2026

Codex have got me hooked off the back of these resets.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 15/08/2026

How did I only learn today that the mini floating keyboard in iPadOS supports swipe typing, like on iOS 😍

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 15/08/2026

This works and is preferable to unvetted, often paid alternatives in the App Store or equivalent.

Generating an extension in Safari on iOS 27.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 14/08/2026

To be clear, this is as relevant to me as tornadoes in Texas. This system only works if it’s reserved for true emergencies with appropriate geolocational scoping.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 14/08/2026

UK govt: if you send emergency alerts to my phone about things that are not emergencies and do not concern me (wildfires far away from my city) I will simply turn off those alerts. Cmon

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 14/08/2026

After a year of placing my iPhone Air face down unprotected, it has no visible scratches. Dropped it plenty of times too. Ceramic Shield 2 is more than marketing fluff!

Because of this my agent dictation keeps saying "Fred" 😭 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fron...

en.wikipedia.org

Th-fronting - Wikipedia

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To my surprise, being Codex app-first, I'm actually messaging multiple threads at once pretty often. You can kick off agent investigation on something you've just noticed in the background without having to completely put it off.

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I've switched from Handy to native macOS dictation. I don't know if it's improved in macOS 27 or I just didn't give it a fair shake before, but if all you need it for is transcribing to an agent then it's absolutely sufficient; LLMs are extremely good at parsing meaning from typos.

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Mise x Codex interop · samhh/dotfiles@c6a7135

I've long struggled to get Zed, Codex, etc to hook into my shell, be that for Nix (direnv) or Mise. Mise shims plugged into your system shell are the solution: github.com/samhh/dotfil.... It works with repo-local configs as well!

github.com

This'll probably help Zed and others too. It's similar to what Rustup and Corepack do but generalised.

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I'm finding myself writing bigger, more traditionally-atomic commits again. This actually isn't agent-specific, though it's relevant there: we need better review tools. Reading a long diff like a scroll feels antiquated.

I've dropped Codex 5.6 Sol down to medium from xhigh and am having a much better time. LLMs are still pretty stupid so the speed is more valuable >95% of the time. I haven't tried Fable yet, mind.

Agents with access to your forge can also resolve e.g. flaky CI E2E tests end-to-end (ha). There's typically little value in hand-writing the commit message and PR title in these cases. In the meantime I can work on something more impactful.

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I've long resisted allowing agents to touch my version control, but I'm relaxing on that. GitButler's CLI skill makes agents very helpful at resolving conflicts, splitting commits, etc. Principally the oplog is always there (also in Jujutsu's case) if the agent does something stupid.

I currently have three different views of code open at the same time, not including any forge tabs in my browser. I doubt that'll be the case in a year or two.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 11/08/2026

I'm experimenting with treating the harness as my primary development app, dropping down to my editor only where edits are actually necessary. That's multiple times per day, but a minority of my time in the day.

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I can't believe how many dev hours I've lost to GitHub Actions. There are no sunlit uplands.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 11/08/2026

Reading/scanning code is more important than ever. Do any editors display dynamic metadata above signatures? e.g. a recursion label, approx big O, purity, etc without having to read the function body. Maybe in the future local LLMs will be fast enough for this.

Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 11/08/2026

Robust type-aware linting.

Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 29/07/2026

I'm up to >1B tokens per month with Codex. Though that's using Sol xhigh for everything in a vain attempt to rein in its stupidity. I do wish the feedback loop was faster.

Oliver Ash @oliverjash.me · 28/07/2026

Reposted by Sam 💛

I'm looking for a new role as a lead frontend/TypeScript engineer. 👋 13 years of experience and I formerly led the web team at Unsplash. My CV: drive.google.com/file/d/1Hp7w... If you know of any roles, please reach out. I'd really appreciate if you could share. Thank you!

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 27/07/2026

I quite like my Eight Sleep so far but I can’t get over such an expensive device shipping without WPA3 support in 2026. I’m doomed to forever have two SSIDs.

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Sam 💛 @samhh.com · 27/07/2026

From a recent Fly blog post, advocating AI everything: “I want a world where my friends and family can make computers do exactly what they want, without waiting for me to build everything for them.” A cute sentiment that falls apart on closer inspection. Sometimes this industry is so unserious.