Noel Rappin Writes Here

Every time I think the AI frenzy has peaked, it peaks again. Writing about coding these days feels like Jimmy Stewart dancing on the edge of a floor that’s rapidly receding under him. I had a draft of this that started with five or six capsule stories of interactions with LLMs for coding purposes, some saving incremental time, some being wrong, some even being right. Then I realized that I probably shouldn’t be that detailed about work stuff, but more importantly, you likely have all these stories too.

So, this is wildly late. So late that it mocks the very concept of an end-of-year recap. And honestly, if I didn’t like going back to these things and re-reading them, I probably wouldn’t have finished it. Couple of quick notes before getting to it: The new thing this year is that I used The StoryGraph to rate all the books right after I finished them. You’d think that’d make it easier to get this list out, but apparently not.

Notes and Corrections Before we get fully started here, a couple of notes on Better Know Singleton Classes, which, among other things, got mentioned on Hacker News, giving me comments there for the first time in years, maybe for the first time ever. One Hacker News comment suggested that “Eigenclass” was coined by _why the lucky stiff as a joke and was then adopted by the community. I looked this up and that doesn’t seem to be the case… _why’s Poignant Guide To Ruby uses “metaclass” when it discusses this feature (at least the version I have does…).

It is time to Better Know what is perhaps the Ruby-iest of Ruby things, a feature that didn’t even have an official name for several years, despite being critical to Ruby’s Object-Oriented semantics. (It only just now occurs to me that there was no official name in English, I wonder what the Japanese name for it was…). Yes, it’s the singleton class. Which isn’t really a singleton. Or really a class.