Defeating The Mantis Lords

Waylon Walker Author

August 31, 2025 1 min read

The Knight reigns victorious against the three mantis lords, earning the respect of the mantis village.

💭 "Am I Crazy?" [Wading Through AI - Episode 3]

www.youtube.com

Casey had an interesting point here. I think demitri came back with some sense of sanity that its just not how corporations look at employee cost, but I still thought it was a head scratcher.

Roughly translated not quoted

If the sellers of ai are telling you that your developers are going to be 10x productive, why are they only spending half their salary in tokens? Why not 9x?

💭 A love letter to Pi | Lucas Meijer

www.youtube.com

I hate how he called out terminal user interfaces as shit… then proved web interfaces to be superior. Damn him. I love working from my terminal, but having ai prove itself through html reports including video, image, metrics, charts, and text is goated. Rethinking yourself has the bottleneck not the orchestrator feels real. Validating the work is hard, theres a shift right now and everyone is trying to figure it out. Lucas’s technique is a little bit of be lazy and tell it to prove itself to you, so as you juggle your 15 agents you have a nice report to read.

💭 How Claude Code’s Creator Starts EVERY Project - YouTube

www.youtube.com

This is a really good guide, with quite a few good nuggets. I need to try deleting my AGENTS.md and rebuilding it from scratch more often. I liked how he talked about having agents prove their work and tell them up front how they will be judged. What I didn’t care for so much was the feeling that a lot of the rules go in markdown, thats not a rule, thats a suggestion. Rules should be deterministic. They should be tests and linters that ensure they are followed. Suggestions are good, but dont trust the agents to always follow them. And don’t trust that they wont change your rules, keep them honest.

💭 POV: Growing up as a Millennial be like 🤣 AC:@mikemancusi #mil...

www.youtube.com

Feeling this today, feels like everything continues to get worse. Trying to be more positive, and its hard.

💭 Write It First, Then Let AI Drive - Kenneth Reitz

kennethreitz.org

Interesting take by Kenneth Reitz. Not quite sure how I feel about it anymore. It kinda hurts, but I’m not sure if code aesthetics matter as much as the product anymore. I cared when I was the one editing, but at this point I’m not doing a lot of edits by hand. Do these aesthetics affect the final products that users use, Not sure. AI makes me sad.

Recent Pings #

approve rm #

Hot take, if you are unwilling to approve rm you should rethink your workflow, git state, or backups.

Note

This is meant for normal project work with an agent working in the context of a single project, with directory level access to the project.

Ping 54 #

I'm regressing back to boomer ai for more plan mode style prompting at home... It does a decent job at ingesting a repo and coming up with plans before I start spending precious tokens.

Tokens Just don't go as far as they used to #

Not sure if this is simply the flavor of the month, or a shift in gpt5.4 being super subsidized on release and now that we have gpt5.4-mini-fast out they have shifted, but I'm burning through half of my $20 gippity sub in a day with hobby level use. Second week in a row its burning so fast.

Ping 52 #

Is it just me or are the agents not behaving today?

Ping 50 A #

I wrote code by hand today... I was out of tokens

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