More family stuff to deal with. And work has mainly been a mixture of frustration and LLMs.

Sporadically

For Site Manager I took great care setting up Capybara/Selenium tests. I put in a whole load of timing code and the tests ran extremely reliably. I even got them running in parallel, using Selenium Grid to run 4 browsers at once (in a docker network).

And then on Thursday, it all broke.

I did a bundle update on the project. I think a new selenium docker image was released. I've reverted both of these. But the tests just fail at random points. Well, not random points - they fail randomly, but when they do fail it seems to be certain con every time - maybe about 50 places where it happens but only four of five of them fail on any one run through.

It's really fucking annoying.

Do you prefer fashion victim or ensemble-y challenged?

I discovered Impeccable Style - which is a set of skills for Claude Code (and probably a load of other coding agents) that analyses your user interface.

I grabbed a screenshot of the main site dashboard page, if you are logged in as a Site Manager. And I got this back:

⏺ Design Critique: Site Manager - Storage Park
  ---
  Anti-Patterns Verdict: PASS (with caveats)

  This interface does not look AI-generated. It avoids the typical AI tells: no purple gradients, no glassmorphism, no dark mode with glowing accents, no hero
  metrics with big numbers, no identical rounded cards.

  However, it has a different problem: it looks like legacy enterprise software from 2012. This isn't AI slop—it's "committee software" slop. Functional but
  forgettable.

I mean, give with one hand, take with the other. Sheesh.

He does dress better than I do, what would I bring to the relationship?

And speaking of user-interfaces, I discovered the Unsung blog, after seeing a link to this post - which in turn links to this post about Backseat Software. I've always hated the "we A/B tested everything so we know it's good" attitude but, until reading these, I didn't know why. It's not good, UIs that are built from metrics are boring and designed for the lowest common denominator. If you cared about what you are building, then you would ignore the data and go with the emotion. And you'll probably put some people off - well, good. They're probably wankers.

Sparatacus

I'm just starting with Clawdbot. Mine's called Cher Horowitz and she's installed on my old iMac that's running ElementaryOS. I'm still getting used to what we can do together but it genuinely feels like as big a step forward as when I first tried Claude Code a year ago.