Dmitry Kandalov

The LLM In The Room: ChatGPT Speaks With the long-awaited and much anticipated launch yesterday of the mythical GPT-5, and observing the widespread disappointment that it isn’t just not the superintelligence we were promised, b…

"It is time to stop pretending that we are just one more model away from magic. We are not. The magic trick is over. The rabbit is not coming out of the hat."

codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/08/08/t...

Here is the new "The Ultimate Guide to IntelliJ IDEs" workshop I'm working on dmitrykandalov.com/intellij-wor.... It summarises what I have learned over 20+ years of using IntelliJ IDEs. Let me know if you would like to run it at your company!

I wish IntelliJ "Select in Project" action would say why it couldn't select the current file in the project view, so that I don't need to guess. For example, the file is in an excluded directory that is currently hidden. Details matter!

If you're interested, I could get the prototype to a usable state and publish it 🤔

I have attempted the code golf plugin but never published the source code because it was a bit of a prototype. As you mentioned the difficultly to distinguish manual and automated edits. I went down the route of listing all actions that are manual edits but the list was not exhaustive.

Registration | KotlinConf 2026, May 20–22, Munich KotlinConf is the official Kotlin conference by JetBrains. It is a place for the community to gather and discuss all things Kotlin.

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I love it! There is nothing bad about it.

one of these days Gradle will implement parallel downloads and I won't have to wait 20 minutes after opening an empty Compose project

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I find the hallucination metaphor in the context of LLMs very misleading (perhaps deliberately so). For humans, hallucination is an illusion in the absence of an external stimulus, i.e. malfunction. For LLMs, hallucination is all they can do. It just happens to be correct or wrong 🤷

One of the most annoyingly unnecessary things I've seen too many times recently (including projects using http4k) is passing around base URL and credentials for each function that makes an HTTP call 🙄 In http4k world you can just do `SetBaseUriFrom(...).then(MyAuth()).then(client)`.

YouTube video by Kotlin by JetBrains 47 Refactorings in 45 minutes | Duncan McGregor and Dmitry Kandalov

This is the recording of Duncan McGregor and me doing the "47 refactorings in 45 minutes" talk at #KotlinConf www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwNT.... Aka "47 refactorings in a week with PRs". (Note that it's missing slides, so the intro and outro might not make a lot of sense).

YouTube video by Kotlin by JetBrains 47 Refactorings in 45 minutes | Duncan McGregor and Dmitry Kandalov

Even if you don't like Kotlin or IDEA I would recommend this unreservedly. The exuberance, expertise, focus on quality, knowledge, mastery of the tooling, and sheer nerdiness just shine through 😉 🤣 . Thank you @dmitrykandalov.bsky.social and Duncan McGregor.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwNT...

Hot take: If AI can generate documentation, there is >80% chance it isn't worth writing.

a) It's something an expert will already know this, or
b) You can ask an AI to produce that content.

Treat AI output as an indicator that it *doesn't* need to be explained

Assuming systems are doing their job perfectly if PRs are not about continuous integration (or code quality), they must have another function. What about PRs are about control (or rather an illusion of control)? And that could fundamentally be insecurity/anxiety. #noPRs

As Duncan McGregor speculated, we might be using the same part of the brain to track whether our hands are dirty and to track the size of code changes. So people with different hygiene standards and definitions of "dirty" will tend to disagree? How "clean" are two weeks of commits on a branch? 🤷‍

The problem I've seen with notebooks is that highlighting doesn't work very well. For example, in your screencast imports are initially grey, then they look highlighted, then go red 🤷

What is the topic? 🙃

Spurious Correlations Correlation is not causation: thousands of charts of real data showing actual correlations between ridiculous variables.

One of my favourite websites now with AI making up explains
www.tylervigen.com/spurious-cor...

In my experience, it's hard to know without actually trying it 😅 Can you share the notebook?

I think a good use of "chatbot" would be to automatically replace "chatbot" in social media posts with "chatbot" so we can see that they actually mean "chatbot"

Also everything in the forest is the way it is because everything else in the forest is the way it is. You're not going to get there in a day.

Sad that it has taken the hype of llm coding agents to incentive some folks to prioritise the same things that they could do compassion for their fellow human team-mates.

Small steps, small codebases, fast tests, automation, clear code & docs; all help the bots as well as the team.

Asking because I think I'd like this feature as well but I haven't thought about what I actually want 😅

How would you decide which branches to clean up? 🤔 Also local/remote/both, does "clean up" mean delete?

GitHub - dmcg/gilded-rose-tdd at 47-refactorings-at-kotlin-conf A TDD implementation of the Gilded Rose stock control system - GitHub - dmcg/gilded-rose-tdd at 47-refactorings-at-kotlin-conf

For anyone interested, I pushed the code from the "47 refactorings in 45 minutes" talk by Duncan McGregor and myself at #KotlinConf to this branch github.com/dmcg/gilded-... (including references and mini-plugins). And here is the live stream video www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ9f...

"If you don't know what your organisation is optimising for, then it's probably control" TIL from #KotlinConf keynote by Diana Montalion.

If you happen to be at #KotlinConf today, come over to the Kotlin Foundation Booth at 13:45 where I will do a demo of LivePlugin.

Rich Errors: Nice upcoming feature in Kotlin 2.4 #KotlinConf

I updated the blog post with the non-default IntelliJ settings I use for 2025.2 EAP. Please let me know if you disagree with them dmitrykandalov.com/intellij-set... 😅