Leesa Ward

Me, who has been writing tons of PHP lately and asking Claude questions about it:
"How to [test thing] using Pest?"

Claude: *gives me a spiel, examples, and explanation for...Rust, a language I've asked it about literally 0 times*

Go home Claude, you're drunk. 😅

"Create fonts"
...by inputting examples of existing fonts

Seems legit. /s

My brain:
"Why would you call it Pest if you want people to like it?
...
Oh, I get it. It's test with a P, because it's for PHP.
Wait.
Pest = Test a language that starts with a P.
Hang on.
...
Jest is..."

Fuck I'm stupid for not noticing that before.
😂😂😂

I was going to make a joke about it being on MySpace but then I realised that wouldn't be quite that long ago, which is a refreshing change from the usual "gee I'm old" fare of remembering what's been around since my teen years 😂

3/3 I have also learnt a lot of new things that are not wheel reinventions, for example PHP traits.

Whether this all goes to hell or not, at least I've gotten a conference talk idea out of it. Trying to think of a better name than "Lessons from reinventing the wheel" 😅

2/3 So far I have:
- Accidentally embraced atomic design (to an extent)
- While writing docs, realised some of the output contradicted my library's own purported principles
- Hacked together my own "template syntax"
- More than once, wondered how far away I am from accidentally reinventing MVC.

1/3 I'm developing a UI component library for PHP, almost from scratch aside from some usage parameters that inform the architecture (making it work with WordPress blocks in the first instance).

I want to tell Claude what the answer was and have it know for the next person, dammit!

I feel a distinct lack of closure when I ask an LLM about some coding thing, it spits out hallucinations or overly complex partial suggestions, and I go and find the answer elsewhere but there's no forum post to go back to post the answer on.

100%. One of my favourite things is that the amount of context I can put into an AI chat saves me hours of Googling to piece together a solution. But like what I might initially piece together, AI's first answer might be wrong. It's a remarkable time-saver when you *could* do most of it yourself.

Reminder to self: When you start typing things like "display: absolute", it's probably time for a break. 😂

My partner, who has never had much need to deal with SQL, is excited because he figured out joins for something he's working on.

Me, pointing at the schema: *gives him a pop quiz about why it's designed the way it is and hence joins are necessary, offers further explanation*

My god we're nerdy.

For my first Bluesky post, I would like to share the rabbit hole I spent my Saturday night in: Customising (visually) the output of Xdebug.

I regret nothing.

(PS don't judge me for the errors, I'm hacking around with some experimental stuff and I expected them 😅)