The mental shape of a programming language resurfaces, and my mind craves writing programs in it. Array languages, concatenative, Lisps, Smalltalks.
Any conversation
I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing
130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later. I read
Still trying to figure out the boundaries of these tools' strengths without outsourcing important thinking, problem-solving, and the collective building-up of a mental model of the systems we're developing.
The shape of LLM tools as toolsโfit for a purpose, ergonomicโis becoming clearer, and human patterns of behavior with them that do more harm than good are also becoming easier to recognize.

