I'm thinking about how I work with agents and what it's going to take for me to feel comfortable giving them more autonomy.

butterflysky.dev/posts/be-the...

I've noticed a falloff after ~250k+ tokens, it feels like. Also there's a plugin called serena that gives it some better tools for finding and reasoning about specific code symbols, that seems to help somewhat. Still, the experience is a little messy right now.

I miss you too btw!

I used to write, you might remember. Just stream of consciousness, anecdotes, and I'd spend time editing and structuring each post until it felt right. I know my voice. But I also know it never hurts to have a good editor.

Agents totally helped, multiple passes coordinated across different models to discuss ways to separate out what were originally three disparate posts worth of material and refine this one.

Like in the post, I drove it where I wanted and articulated my perspectives, made it mine. But they helped.

decided to upload to my blog for once:

butterflysky.dev/posts/halluc...

tfw you forget you made a "celebrate" tool in your keylight MCP server but claude code remembers.

I fixed an annoying bug and it cycled my lights through a sequence of colors for like 5 seconds to congratulate me. headpats for the hooman i guess 😆

Now I just need a trick for better airflow while I have covers pulled over my head so I can watch stuff on my phone without disturbing my partner. Snorkel?

You are cozy in bed, but your bluetooth earphones connected to a PC in another room. So you install a terminal on your phone, export an ssh key from your password manager, then use it to login and disconnect them manually via bluetoothctl.

I am also looking forward to the day in the not-too-distant future when they venture out on their own. I'm sure it will be mixed feelings, but I suspect I'll be happy for them and also excited to experience what it will feel like to have some space. I'll always be a dm, text, or a phone call away.

But yeah, they are starting to realize that they're a "real adult" and have to grapple with being accountable to themselves and taking care of themselves. Fun times. I think it's really about starting a life-long practice of reflection and consciously choosing their own adventure.

But I'm drawing on patience I never knew I'd have. I came from a world where "boot to the ass" style motivation was the standard. That doesn't work with this young adult. Besides, it's better if they learn to stop self-sabotaging now. Reframe, increase stress tolerance. They'll get there. Someday.

I absolutely love having conversations with them and getting insight into how they look at things. I want to encourage them to be more self-sufficient - largely because for me that's an empowering feeling, and I want that for them. The things they think are hard now can become easy with practice.

We're both autistic, we're both ADHD. I just went most of my life without knowing those things, while they learned pretty early on. I wonder if having these labels applied early in life affects how they weigh their own capabilities and options for engaging with the things they have to do.

I'm in awe sometimes at how different we are. But we had totally different childhoods, different parents, different social contexts and even technological immersion. I'm more in that little "Oregon Trail" generation, feel more like a gen-Xer than a millennial when I look at descriptions of each.

I think they're overthinking this. I said sometimes I psych myself out about things I dread doing if I think too much, so I train myself to notice that and break the thing down into smaller steps that are more approachable.

I pointed out how conscientious they are when it comes to obligations to others, that it's interesting how this only comes up for them when it comes to doing things that benefit them personally. Asked them what they thought about that.

They feel stressed about being "caught doing the right thing for fear it will become the expectation going forward."

I smiled at that, acknowledged that I feel that way sometimes too, but said that's where self-discipline comes in. Or as I like to say sometimes, "embrace the suck."

I was worried about feeding them at that age. Now they are 21 and stressed that I encouraged them to go to the grocery store and buy a bag of groceries for themselves rather than order groceries in. We had an interesting heart-to-heart about that.

For me, I got married at 19 and had them at 20. Prior to that, I was on my own at 16 anyway. So I think I had a different lens by 21. By that time I was in the Air Force and had a whole different set of responsibilities and expectations that framed my perspectives anyway. A whole different lifetime.

My 21-year-old just referred to their classmates as 'real adults', as if they're not one themselves. I said, "You're also a real adult," trying to help them get into a different mindset.

When did you start feeling like a so-called 'real adult'? What's that even mean for you?

I'm interested in learning more, for sure. Thanks for replying and engaging!

I'm looking forward to being part of a team again and bringing my enthusiasm and rigor to the team's work. I can't help but energize the people around me when I'm enjoying myself and discovering new things. So, let's go, I'm ready to fly with some people that are motivated and building great things.

Anyway, my resume is at cv.butterflysky.dev and I plan on expanding it with personal projects I've been focused on to have a better story than "been on a break" for the past year. Because my idea of a break was more like working on my own interests rather than toward company goals. I invested in me.

I am curious though, what kind of jobs should I be looking for and applying for? I have software engineering skills, production engineering skills, and "devops" chops.

But what do the things I've posted so far point at as my unique value proposition? Who's looking for what I bring?

So, I'm developing my voice again. Just writing about what I'm doing as I'm doing it, thinking it. Because this work is also fun for me. I'm a puzzle solver at heart, and I live for learning for learning's sake.

One of my goals this year is to share what I'm doing more frequently.

I've been told my output has been "hyper-competent but constrained," lots of rigor and correctness with deep explanations. The advice I was given is to just be specific and idiosyncratic and trust readers to keep up or not.

I am ready to look for a job again with renewed confidence in my technical chops. I'm just not sure what roles to look for these days. You might be able to tell from my posts that I have a penchant for driving investigations to the ground and considering interactions of complex systems as a whole.

I've spent a bit over a year not working for anyone else.

instead I focused on technical growth and development. I built a cool k8s homelab as a platform to facilitate prototyping fun projects, host and serve my family's media libraries, and give me tools to do deep dives into how things work.

I still need to go back and diagnose those retransmits - probably going to drag a long stretch of CAT-6A through the house to stream the mirrored packets off the MikroTik span, see if they're even still there. Who knows. My house is full of Heisenbugs. On that note, I'm going to bed. 🙃