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Week of Efficiency

Vacation-week notes on AI tooling, Advent of Code, React Native, Typst, and practical agent workflows.

I’ve been on a tear at programming this week while on vacation.

  • Began reading AI literature (Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach Fourth Edition)
  • Began reading learncpp - fantastic work on there
  • Began reading into agents and how they work - I bought Claude Max Pro and have never pushed more code in my life
  • Early MVP for my new react native app
  • Finished AoC (with Claude’s help)
  • Migrated my resume automation from LaTeX to typst with Claude’s help

Claude Opus 4.5 is Seriously Good

Ever since I’ve tested Sonnet and Gemini 6 months ago, I was not impressed from what I was seeing. To test what they could do, I gave it a few simple tasks a junior and a mid level engineer would be able to do.

The first one being adding Loki logs to a Go application (it could literally be anything) and sending it to a docker container. A few months ago it was unable to do this; last week it was.

The second one was asking it to create a Warcraft 3 Replay parser. This is a much more complicated problem because it’s given an unknown file type and it has to dissect the file byte by byte. There is an open source implementation but I forbade it from looking at it and translating it (LLMs should be able to do this without too much difficulty). I gave this problem to two people who were more knowledgeable about agents than me and they were both able to create a Go rendition and a Rust rendition. Seriously impressive results today compared to where we were a few months ago.

I was doing AoC this year and got stuck on a problem and it was able to help, and now I’m sitting on 24/24 ⭐ on my account. Seriously impressive.

On my backlog I also wanted to create a vacationing app for myself to finally go somewhere and do research on when to go, and asked Claude to help with creating an app for it. Currently a work in progress, but I’ve had decent results creating PoC workflows, working with specialized “agents”, and working with the Apple Developer suite. I think I’m still far off from releasing to the Apple App Store but it’s much better than having a prototype on the screen vs. an idea in my head. Here’s some further reading I received from some colleagues on agents:

The other thing on my backlog was moving from LaTeX to typst for my resume automation. typst promises a lot of what LaTeX offers but without the LaTeX. I asked Claude to translate my .tex and .cls code to .typ and it was fairly successful. Squashed a few bugs and some ATS min/maxing and it ended up being quite decent.

All in all this may sound like I have a problem taking time off (I do and am creating an app for this problem) and this is an advertisement for Claude Max (honestly it may be). Do I add vibe coding as one of my skills now on my resume and my home page?