Automated Commit Messages and Flow State

I recently came across OpenCommit, which claims to “generate commit messages with an LLM in 1 sec”. Here’s what’s good:

• Helps maintain flow state - you can fire-and-forget and the messages are about as accurate as they’d be if a human wrote them
• Available on the command line, just oco
• Works reasonably well with local models running via ollama serve
• MIT Licensed

Regarding “flow”, pay attention the next time you write a commit message. Do you feel the context switch happening as you go from “doing” to “documenting”? I do, and I have aversion to that feeling.

Tmux Mouse Support

After over 2 decades using GNU Screen for multiplexing, often on machines where tmux wasn’t a sensible option, I’ve realized that I’ll probably never find myself telnetting (!) into a solaris box again.

Still, tmux doesn’t “just work” the way I want with the Mac OS terminal. I am aware iterm2, wezterm, kitty and several others exist, but it’s 2025 and I’m just now migrating away from screen, so that’s the level of stodge I’m at. I still want to use the mouse to copy/paste text while I change my muscle memory from screen to tmux.

The Surprise/Delight Ratio

When things happen, I often find myself rating them with two vector quantities.

1. Surprise - is it surprising or unsurprising?
2. Delight - is it horrifying or is it delightful?

Great Leaders Connect With Customers

WebStorm and Chrome Profiles

I built a very special Chrome profile for doing Next.JS Tutorials and I wanted WebStorm to launch it for me. It didn’t go well.

Just use {{my favorite tech}}...

Here’s some shit developers say to each other when the other person is stuck and we don’t actually have an answer to their problem.

• Just use PHP, Django, Rails, fuck it just use PHP (Laravel, you know)
• Just use Emacs, Sublime, vim, macvim, neovim, Intellij, Cursor, fuck it just use Notepad
• Just get a Mac, use debian, use ubuntu, use centos fuck it just use WSL

Bullshit in Technology Marketing

Two Types of Stability

In order to survive, the human body maintains stability in two ways.

Homeostasis — the process of maintaining internal stability by adhering to fixed points.

Examples: maintaining optimal pH, liver enzymes, body temperature

Allostasis — the process of obtaining stability by adapting to anticipated demands or environmental stressors.

Examples: cortisol during fight or flight, inflammatory responses, shunting of blood

Both are necessary for survival. One is required to keep the organism alive over the long term, the other helps us respond to emergent or future scenarios.

Challenging the Supremacy of Flow State

I’ve long thought that the ability to maintain flow state for hours was the hallmark of a good programmer. I prided myself on being in such a deep state of flow that I would often fail to notice the passing of hours, the setting sun. I would often only reluctantly step away to pee. I would work late into the night, uninterrupted by the world.

As the systems I’ve worked on have become more complex, technologically diverse, and frankly riddled with errors, I’ve realized that what I thought of as “flow” is actually just a state of chasing my own thoughts, trying to immediately fix whatever annoyances or weirdnesses I encounterd, and finishing my days not having completed my initial goals for the day.