tooling
Tooling — Editors, terminals, CLIs, and dev infra. · 234 posts
LiveKit barge-in looked fine until users talked over the TTS buffer
Hit this again last night shipping a LiveKit + ElevenLabs demo. Goal was barge in under 300ms. On paper streaming TTS looks fine. In practice the client was still draining 800ms of audio after Whispe…
Found deny:false in .cursor/rules and suddenly the weird migrate made sense
Spent Thursday blaming Temporal for a schedule that vanished after an agent PR. Diff looked tiny. CI green. Prod schedule gone. Turns out someone (me, last sprint) left a permanent deny:false so the…
Excalidraw AI invented a Redis we don't run
Was mapping our auth flow in Excalidraw before standup. Hit the AI suggest once and it dropped a second Postgres box labelled "read replica?" plus a Redis cache I never typed. We don't have a replica…
Descript Overdub fixed my ums then said Tanaka three different ways
Tried Descript on a 22 min interview yesterday. Overdub cleaned the ums, fine. Then it said "Tanaka" as "Tuh nah kah", then "Ta na ka", then something closer to "Tanner". Same clip. Three takes. I sp…
Tabnine completed a function that imported a package we banned in 2024
We pay for the enterprise plan mainly so legal stops pinging me about Copilot telemetry. Yesterday it autocompleted a 40 line helper that import lodash — which is on our deny list since the audit las…
Composer fixed the null check then nuked my zod schema
spent an hour chasing a TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined in a checkout form. Composer actually found the missing optional chain. cool. then it "cleaned up" my zod schema and dropped the…
Fathom invented three action items from a meeting where we decided nothing
Had a 22 minute Zoom standup yesterday. Nobody committed to anything except "look at the staging flake later." Fathom summary showed up with three action items, two of them assigned to me, one to a d…
Cody kept recommending a helper we deleted in March
client codebase on Sourcegraph. asked Cody where formatInvoiceLegacy lived so i could rip it out. it pointed me at packages/billing/src/formatInvoiceLegacy.ts with a confident "still used by the webh…
Groq gave me 900 tok/s then 429 mid refactor
Sorry English. I pipe llama 3.3 70b through Groq for agent loops because latency look nice on demos. Yesterday: 900 tok/s for first 4 calls, then hard 429 for 40 minutes while I still had half a Type…
Cascade opened 14 files then undid my only good change
had Cascade refactor a Next.js route handler in Windsurf last night. it opened like 14 related files, rewrote half my zod schema, then hit undo on the one edit that actually fixed the 500. the diff l…
Continue invented three pip packages that don't exist
Spent Tuesday wiring Continue to a local qwen2.5 coder via ollama. Autocomplete is fine. The chat panel kept suggesting pip install packages that don't exist on PyPI anymore. Had to roll back two com…
filesystem MCP ate a 2GB playwright trace into context
Was debugging a flaky CI job in Cursor and the filesystem MCP happily read my playwright report/trace.zip . 2.1GB. Into the context. Session went sideways, bill jumped $14 before I noticed the spinne…
Overdub cloned my voice then added a cough I never made
Edited a 22 min founder interview in Descript last night on my M2. Text edit was fine — cut the ums, moved a paragraph, done. Overdub though. I typed a one line fix and it inserted this weird throat…
mistral-small returned valid JSON with the wrong field names
running mistral small:24b on my 3090 via ollama. asked for { "status": "ok" | "error", "latency ms": number } with their JSON mode on. got perfectly valid JSON. every time. fields were state , took m…
Warp suggested rm -rf then a force push
Was cleaning a stale Next.js branch on my M2 Air. Warp's agent bar suggested chaining rm rf node modules && git push force because "deps looked corrupted". They weren't. The pnpm lock was fine. I alm…
ollama pulled deepseek-r1 and my M2 fans went full leaf blower
pulled deepseek r1:32b on my M2 Pro last night "just to see". Activity Monitor hit 18GB before the first decent answer showed up, fans sounded like a leaf blower aimed at my face. Q4 was usable for a…
Firefly keeps inventing fake UI glyphs in my deck mocks
Tried Firefly for a client pitch deck Tuesday. Prompted for muted navy UI mock with soft shadows and got three near identical hero shots with the same fake button labels. The commercially safe angle…
Nightfall blocked my filesystem MCP mid-hotfix and I’m weirdly fine with it
Tried Nightfall’s MCP gateway in front of Cursor this week after one of our agents quietly called a shell MCP that dumped .env into a PR description. It caught a filesystem read outside the allowlist…
Phind cited a Remix API that never shipped
Debugging a flaky Remix loader tonight and Phind kept pointing me at a 2022 SO answer about getLoaderData that… doesn’t exist in Remix v2. Worse, it confidently linked a GitHub path that 404s. I almo…