Yeah, actually that's what I do. I pay for important services and choose companys where that actually respond to you. Email, calendar, etc I pay fastmail, for example. But really you can't avoid having to trust someone/thing.
As much as possible though I don't use services at all for important things. My photos for example are not in the cloud. And I have backups where that is not possible. Do I have a Google account? Yes I have many. What would happen if Google locked me out of one? Nothing I'd move on because I don't care.
You can't eliminate the risk but you can do things to limit it, and that starts with recognising Google/apple/Microsoft don't give a shit about you or your data. And you are not worth their time if their systems flag your stuff for deletion.
Not even close. A friend and I are working on an iOS game (a tower defense style game). We are writing 0 code ourselves. We both have a history of iOS development, he is still actively involved and I've move away from it in recent years.
In about 2 weeks we have a functional game, 60 levels, 28 different types of enemies, a procedurally generated daily challenge mode, an infinity mode. Tower crafting and upgrades, an economy system in the game for pay for the upgrades.
This likely would have taken us months to get to the point that we are at, it was playable on Day 2.
I start with what I want to build. In the initial prompt I provide an overview of what I want, and then some specifics. Last night I added an archive to the Daily Challenge mode, so if you missed a day's challenge you could go back and play it. This is what my initial prompt looked like:
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I'd like to add an archives mode to the daily challenge. This will allow players to complete any daily challenges they didn't attempt on the actual day.
It will look like a calendar, with the dates in Green if it was played, and in white if not.
The archive should only go back to January 30, 2026, the day the project started. Include a to do to change this date prior to release.
Rewards for completing daily challenges via the archive should be 25% of the normal value.
---
Claude Code then asked me a couple of clarifying questions before it harnessed the superpowers:writing-plans skill and generate a document to plan the work. The document it put together is viewable at https://gist.github.com/Jeremy1026/cee66bf6d4b67d9a527f6e30f...
There were a couple of edits that I made to the document before I told it to implement. It then fired off a couple of agents to perform the tasks in parallel where possible.
Once it finished I tested and it worked as I had hoped. But there was a couple of follow up things that would make it more intertwined with everything else going on around daily challenges. So I followed up with:
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lets give 1 cell for compelting an archived daily challenge
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And finally:
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Now that we are tracking completions, can we update the notification to complete daily mission to include "Keep your X day streak"
Sounds like I should give Claude Code another try. The last time I worked with it, it was quite eager to code without a good plan, and would overcomplicate things all the time.
Not entirely relevant, but the example I remember is I asked for help with SQL to concatenate multiple rows into a single column with SQL Server and instead of reminding me to use STRING_AGG, it started coding various complicated joins and loops.
So my experience is/was a little different. Regardless, I think I should take one of my old programs and try implementing it from ground up by explaining the issue I'm trying to solve to see how things progress, and where things fail.
Another example is the tower stat caps. When Claude Code generate the first pass, it make it so that the tower level would control each individual stat's cap. Which was way too high. I didn't know exactly what the limits were, but knew they needed to be pulled back some. So I asked it:
-Start Prompt-
Currently, a towers level sets the maximum a single stat can be. Can you tell me what those stat caps are?
-End Prompt-
This primed the context to have information about the stat caps and how they are tied to levels. I followed up after it gave me a chart back with Tower Level and Max Stat Rank with some real stats from play
-Start Prompt-
Lets change the stat cap, the caps are currently far too high. All towers start at 1 for each IMPACT stat, my oldest tower is Level 5, and its stats are I-3, M-4, P-6, A-3, C-1, T-1. How do you think I could go about reducing the cap in a meaningful way.
-End Prompt-
It came back with a solution to reduce the individual stat cap for individual stats to be tower level + 1. But I felt that was too limiting. I want players to be able to specialize a tower so I told it have the stat cap be total, not per stat.
-Start Prompt-
I'm thinking about having a total stat cap, so in this towers case, the total stats are 18.
-End Prompt-
It generated a couple of structures of how the cap could increase and presented them to me.
-Start Prompt-
Yes, it would replace the per-stat cap entirely. If a player wants to specialize a tower in one stat using the entire cap that is fine.
Lets do 10 + (rank * 3), that will give the user a little bit of room to train a new tower.
Since it's a total stat cap, if a user is training and the tower earns enough stat xp to level beyond the cap, lock the tower at max XP for that stat, and autoamtically level the stat when the user levels up the tower.
-End Prompt-
It added the cap, but introduced a couple of build errors, so I sent it just the build errors.
-Start Prompt-
/Users/myuser/Development/Shelter Defense/Shelter Defense/Views/DebugTowerDetailView.swift:231:39 Left side of mutating operator isn't mutable: 'tower' is a 'let' constant
/Users/myuser/Development/Shelter Defense/Shelter Defense/Views/DebugTowerEditorView.swift:181:47 Left side of mutating operator isn't mutable: 'towerInstance' is a 'let' constant
You've written and deleted several of these "AI doomer" posts this week. I think you're projecting a deep-rooted personal desire and not really addressing the pragmatic preexisting demand that makes AI important. War, misinformation, automation, fraud, pornography, none of these applications are going away. In many ways, they're more accessible and rewarding than ever before. If you want to hedge a bet on humanity making terrible choices, then AI is a perfectly antifragile investment.
It's not pleasant to imagine the full spectrum of AI applications. The same could be generalized for edtech, defense, surveillance, security and privately-owned prison economics. Alas, they're still with us and immensely lucrative.
Not even close. Not yet at least. AI is definitely helping with menial coding tasks, but the more complex stuff is still best left to the human in the loop. And the HitL is still needed to make sure the basic stuff is done well.
This is pretty interesting, I know Boris likes to work with multiple Claude Code instances open at once having them crank away on stuff simultaneously. This sounds like taking his workflow of spawning multiple instances and making it a built in feature.
Good question. So one change I made last year was to cap the number of queues the free account could utilize. It's sort of hard to know for certain if that was what moved the needle though.
There has been a suggestion that maybe the free plan could just be a time-limited trial instead.
But it feels like there is some risk associated with that - as often a customer will use the free plan for (eg) six months, before hitting the limits and becoming a paid account.
I sysadmin my kids' PTA website. OpenAI was scraping it recently. I saw it looking at the event calendar, request after request to random days. I saw years 1000 through 3000 scroll by. I changed the response to their user agent to an access denied, but it still took about 4 hours for them to stop.
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