"I have no idea what the answer is, so it must be ..."

A phenomenon I call "Out of ignorance, comes certainty".

> I don't understand how anyone in good conscience can vote against this tax.

For all the reasons you can vote against any tax.

Taxation is not the default. The justification always has to come from the proponents.

And I say this as a pro tax person who has voted for more taxes and lives in a high income tax state.

I say they get plenty of money already. The amount of fraud and grift is incredible anytime tax money is being spent.

Defense contractors, road works, entitlement fraud, politicians' unexplainable wealth, college tuition, learing centers, and the list goes on.

Manage the money properly.

The time to talk about these things is when we spend them, not when we need to pay for them though.

Logically speaking, the solution is clear going forward:

1. Higher taxes 2. Reduced government spending

However, we are not willing to have these difficult conversations and are focused on appeasing people.

Also, lets put things in context -- here is a summary from Claude. Over the last decade, federal income taxes went down for nearly everyone in rate terms, but the percentage benefit was larger for high earners and corporations.

Another option is to increase the tax base. Washington has had high population growth this century which has been great for revenues.

Disagree. Why trust someone with more money when they haven’t proven they can avoid squandering what they have?

28 flights per year.

That's 14 round trip flights. A little over once a month. Not at all surprising if once a month. Or divorced and kid is in another state.

If we're generous and assume each trip is actually 2 flights (i.e. connecting flights), then it's 7 per year.

Yeah, more than typical. But not insane.

> Not at all surprising if once a month.

Typo: Should have been "Not at all surprising if for work".

> First, none of us have any power to "tax it more" so this is a dead end of discussion.

You probably have more power over that than changing a whole population's behavior.

I'd wager you probably have more power over that than changing just one person's behavior (Felix).

> Second, people have agency and we can hold them accountable socially for negative actions even if they are abiding by the current laws (or tax regime).

And people are holding you accountable for the shaming. This leads primarily to polarization, not change. Polarized folks are more likely to increase the negative behavior.

This was great because you didn't put much effort into it. Whereas the conclusion was about "it is not worth building your own solution".

I wish there was a way to "freeze" the tests. I want to write the tests first (or have Claude do it with my review), and then I want to get Claude to change the code to get them to pass - but with confidence that it doesn't edit any of the test files!

I use devcontainers in all the projects I use claude code on. [1] With it you can have claude running inside a container with just the project's code in write access and also mount a test folder with just read permissions, or do the opposite. You can even have both devcontainers and run them at the same time.

[1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/devcontainer

If you want to try it just ask Claude to set it up for your project and review it after.

1. Make tests 2. Commit them 3. Proceed with implementation and tell agent to use the tests but not modify them

It will probably comply, and at least if it does change the tests you can always revert those files to where you committed them

Are there really no ways to control read/write permissions in a smart way? I've not had to do this yet, but is it really only capable of either being advisory with you implementing all the code, or it having full control over the repo where you just hope nothing important is changed?

You could probably make a system-level restriction so the software physically can't modify certain files, but I'm not sure how well that's going to fly if the program fails to edit it and there's no feedback of the failure.

You can use a Claude PreToolUse command hook to prevent write (or even read) access to specific files.

With this approach you can enforce that Claude cannot access to specific files. It’s a guarantee and will always work, unlike a prompt or Claude.md which is just a suggestion that can be forgotten or ignored.

This post has an example hook for blocking access to sensitive files:

https://aiorg.dev/blog/claude-code-hooks#:~:text=Protect%20s...

No. I don't want the mental burden of auditing whether it modified the tests.

Then, run the agent vm-sandboxed, with tests mounted as a read-only directory, if your directory structure allows it.

Or, less securely, hash the tests and check the hash with a hook, post tool use. Or a commit hook.

You'd be surprised - I know I was - you can encode Test-Driven development into workflows that agents actually follow. I wrote an in-depth guide about this and have a POC for people to try over here: https://www.joegaebel.com/articles/principled-agentic-softwa...

Why can't you do just that? You can configure file path permissions in Claude or via an external tool.

Why not use a client-server infrastructure for tests? The server sends the test code, the client runs the code, sends the output to the server and this replies pass/not pass.

One could even make zero-knowledge test development this way.

You can remove edit permissions on the test directory

I'm not up to speed on Claude's features. Can I, from the prompt, quickly remove those permissions and then re-add them (i.e. one command to drop, and one command to re-add)?

Yeah, you can type `/permisssions` and do it there. Or you can make a custom slash command, or just ask Claude to do it. You can also set it when you launch a claude session, there are a dozen ways to do anything.

yeah i agree - this is somewhat the approach I have been using more of. Write the tests first based on specs and then write code to make the tests pass. This works well for cases where unit tests are sufficient.

Just tell it that the tests can't be changed. Honestly I'd be surprised if it tried to anyway. I've never had it do that through many projects where tests were provided to drive development.

"Add a config option preventing you from modifying files matching src/*_test.py."

It's because Magit is doing a lot more than just status. It executes multiple git commands to get all the information it wants to display.

As a sibling said, you can disable much of that.

Is there anything prominently missing in majutsu?

I'm still learning jj, so I'm not sure about jj things that majutsu might be missing, or what git/magit things seem "missing" but are just done differently in jj.

A couple of things I tend to notice:

- In magit, I can run a raw git shell commands by pressing `:`; majutsu doesn't seem to have that, so I use Emacs ordinary `M-!`

- The default view in majutsu (log) isn't as slick as magit's. With magit, I'll routinely open it up to look at the repo status, browse through the diffs (expanding/collapsing), staging/unstaging, etc. With majutsu, most of that requires first opening up the log, then opening up the diff of a commit.

- Staging/unstaging in magit is quite nice. The analogous workflow in jj seems to be splitting/squashing, but that feels clunkier in majutsu.

I've not opened bugs or PRs for these things, since it's mostly vibes and I don't have actual solutions to offer ;-)

EDIT: Oh, I also remembered that `jj` ignores $PAGER and uses its own built-in paging by default. That tries to act like `less`, and doesn't work well in Emacs. It can't use env vars either, unless we set its pager to something like `sh -c "$PAGER"` (see https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/config/#pager ). Since my $PAGER is always `cat`, I've just set that as jj's pager directly too.

> you haven't used a mac in over 20 years

Not what he said. You misparsed.

Similar story, albeit not so extreme. I have similar ergonomic issues that crop up from time to time. My programming is not so impacted (spend more time thinking than typing, etc), but things like email, documentation, etc can be brutal (a lot more computer usage vs programming).

My simple solution: I use Whisper to transcribe my text, and feed the output to an LLM for cleanup (custom prompt). It's fantastic. Way better than stuff like Dragon. Now I get frustrated with transcribing using Google's default mechanism on Android - so inaccurate!

But the ability to take notes, dictate emails, etc using Whisper + LLM is invaluable. I likely would refuse to work for a company that won't let me put IP into an LLM.

Similarly, I take a lot of notes on paper, and would have to type them up. Tedious and painful. I switched to reading my notes aloud and use the above system to transcribe. Still painful. I recently realized Gemini will do a great job just reading my notes. So now I simply convert my notes to a photo and send to Gemini.

I categorize all my expenses. I have receipts from grocery stores where I highlight items into categories. You can imagine it's painful to enter that into a financial SW. I'm going to play with getting Gemini to look at the photo of the receipt and categorize and add up the categories for me.

All of these are cool applications on their own, but when you realize they're also improving your health ... clear win.

> I'm going to play with getting Gemini to look at the photo of the receipt and categorize and add up the categories for me.

FWIW, I have a pet project for a family recipe book. I normalize all recipes to a steps/instructions/ingredients JSON object. A webapp lets me snap photos of my old recipes and AI reliably yields perfectly structured objects back. The only thing I've had to fix is odd punctuation. For production, use is low, so `gemini-2.5-flash` works great and the low rate limits are fine. For development the `gemma-3-27b-it` model has MUCH higher limits and still does suprisingly well.

I'd bet you can pull this off and be very happy with the result.

I maintain expense tracking software that I wrote a while ago (before ChatGPT) that sends receipts and some metadata about them into Google Sheets (previously Expensify). A few months ago, I used Claude to add a feature that does exactly what you describe, but using the data types and framework I built for receipt parsing. It works really well.

Honestly, you can probably build what I built entirely with Gemini or Claude, probably with a nice frontend to boot.