# 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, and a lot of my friends tell 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.
## Invocations
I'm keeping a list of workflows and behavior patterns I've found useful for my
work. A spellbook of sorts. Not everything I'm using, because 1. I'm lazy,
and 2. I'm not sure enough about everything to make it public.
- **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 14-inch macbook. Sounds silly, but I'm internet-rich
screen-space-constrained.
- **Diff before and after screenshots.**
- This is as blackbox as you can get. Being able to leave the AI spinning for
an hour or two trying match a screenshot makes big migrations so much
easier.
- **Build the thing to build the thing.**
- Game developers do it all the time. You build a level editor to build the
game.
- 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.
### Favorite rules
It's kinda funny how we all carry bits of markdown with sacred knowledge for the
spirits in the machine. I don't want to be finicky, but some additional guidance
does help them a lot.
Below, you can find excerpts from my spellbook, some of the rules I'm using in
all agent CLIs and editors.
#### ast-grep
> Use `ast-grep` to search for patterns in the codebase and simple refactorings.
>
> Think of it as your old-friend grep, but matching AST nodes instead of text.
> You can write patterns as if you are writing ordinary code. It will match all
> code that has the same syntactical structure. You can use $ sign + upper case
> letters as a wildcard, e.g. $MATCH, to match any single AST node. Think of >
> it as regular expression dot ., except it is not textual.
>
> CLI usage:
>
> ast-grep has following form.
>
> ```
> ast-grep --pattern 'var code = $PATTERN' --rewrite 'let code = new $PATTERN' --lang ts
> ```
>
> Examples:
>
> Rewrite code in null coalescing operator
>
> ```
> ast-grep -p '$A && $A()' -l ts -r '$A?.()'
> ```
>
> Rewrite Zodios
>
> ```
> ast-grep -p 'new Zodios($URL, $CONF as const,)' -l ts -r 'new Zodios($URL, $CONF)' -i
> ```
#### no-bullshit
Don't list benefits of the work you did. You don't need to advertise yourself.
#### typescript
Never annotate return types of functions, let TypeScript infer them. Never
annotate callback function parameters if TypeScript can infer them.
#### .tsx
> Never use `React.FC`. Never use `useCallback`. Never tightly couple `useState`
> with `useEffect` as this may lead to a infinite loop. Derive values > instead.
>
> ALWAYS accept root element props and spread them like
>
> ```tsx
> interface ButtonProps extends React.HTMLAttributes {
> variant?: "primary" | "secondary";
> }
> const Button = ({ variant, ...rest }: ButtonProps) => {
> return (
>