Shaman Update
You might have noticed the game got patched and there’s a new class.
If you’ve been playing a Wizard like me for your entire adult life, you might find this a bit spooky.
We’ve been deciphering and crafting spells, learning math and physics, diving deep into insurmountable complexity.
We’ve made some money on it. But we also had fun.
The game changed. A lot of my friends told me they just don’t find managing Claude Code pleasant. I don’t find managing Claude Code pleasant.
I’m trying to, though. I’m changing my build into Wizard 11, Shaman 1.
I hope I can find joy in wielding multiple genies and demons, (AI agents) forcing them to do my bidding, defending from their attempts to snitch on me or worse.
There is some technical complexity to it that might be fun. The idea sounds nice if you paint it with some fantasy framing or if you look at it through cyberpunk lens.
It also helps to notice just how bad the vibe-coded stuff from people who don’t know what they’re doing is. My comp sci degree, my decade of experience: It’s not gonna go to waste even if AI writes majority of my code.
I hope this framing can help you find some joy in it too.
I’m gonna keep a list of workflows and behavior patterns I’ve found useful for my work.
Invocations
- Make sure we didn’t mess it up.
- With Lighthouse and Vercel MCPs I iterated on perf improvements for the new GraphQL.org website by running an audit on each new deployment. This was faster than doing it manually because the LLM took care of diffing and I could focus on the code without leaving the editor, without changing the browser tab on my 14inch macbook. Sounds silly, but I’m internet-rich screen-space-constrained.
- Build the thing to build the thing.
- Game developers do it all the time. You build a level editor.
- example: https://x.com/geoffreylitt/status/1960344454348292374
- I did something similar to Geoffrey’s AI HUD but with Ink for a tricky migration (lots of global scope, file moves changed paths). Telling the genie to JUST DO IT (tm) ended terribly so I needed a workbench with before/after preview.
- Game developers do it all the time. You build a level editor.
Disclaimer
I have almost no idea how to get the most out of these new tools. It’s AWESOME, isn’t it? I work the best and I have the most fun when diving into deep water.
If you have some alpha please share it somewhere and send me a link. Like any new game update, this new class is super buggy and unpolished, but I think we can all have a lot of fun and maybe become more productive at the end of it.
The beginning wisdom is the statement ‘I don’t know’. The person who cannot make that statement is one who will never learn anything.”
—Thrall (or actually Keith R.A. DeCandido) in Cycle of Hatred
