Side question: I've always been a recreational runner, running 3/4x a week, completed a few half marathons, and recently decided to _also_ go to the gym to do strength training as it has a lot of benefits for runners too. Should I consider/take creatine, is it useful?
I run and do strength training. I think the consensus is that it's not that beneficial for running. You're going to gain a bit of weight which presumably is going to make you slower.
If you were a competitive runner then you'd probably want to cycle it so that you get the strength training benefit but also optimize for your races.
I take it. I did a 10k race and stopped for two weeks. I'm also not super consistent but I try to take about 5-10g a day.
In terms of optimizing overall health I would say take it + running + strength training is a good combination. The effects are not huge and vary person to person.
I’m an ultra runner, I’ll do 50-60 mpw weeks during peak weeks with strength training.
I take 10g creatine, it did wonders for me. More energy and mental sharpness.
Strength training is essential for runners to avoid injury at high mileage. Sleep, strength, and nutrition. It can’t be ignored or you will get injured.
Some folks mention cutting it out to lose weight but at higher mileage I find it hard to keep on weight anyway.
Agree on getting enough protein (and sleep, and recovery time).
Strength training isn't all about mass. You can get stronger without gaining mass. There is a neural component and an efficiency component. At some point though you do need a bigger muscle to be stronger. There is also the question of whether you're optimizing for faster (fast twitch) or slower movements.
Strength training is not only about mass but for most intents and purposes it is about gaining as much muscle as possible while not gaining too much extra.
It's not like one can move from squating 100kg to squating 150kg without extra 2-3 kgs of meat.
And there is NO WAY of growing meat in a calorie deficit. And running often leads to that.
Creatine increased my weight and made me a slower runner. I believe for long distance running creatine does not give any benefits. For sprints it might be different. But be aware that if you suddenly increase your training load with the help of creatine, you might easily injure yourself, because your joints are not ready for it.
What if you then use AI to try and maintain only one, a single product into which you’ll put your care and craft to try to make something that’s better than “some dopamine hits”?
That’s how I use it. I might be working on two or three features at a time (iterating, iterating, iterating…), but they’re all scoped and of user value; I don’t feel that I’m just off chasing rabbits.
But I’m also one of those people for whom the “fun” was always solving human problems rather than solving computer problems. I can see how if you are in the latter category AI has already sucked out a lot of joy and how rapidly project switching could be the least-unfun option.
As someone constantly nerd-sniped, the difficulty is that our instincts are still being formed about what this current era of AI tools can and cannot do.
So when a blocker or an idea pops up, it's very easy to use that magic-like tool to solve it quickly and then go back to whatever it's you were doing before.
However, if you care about the quality of your output, that won't be a quick detour. It will pile up with the other "quick" tasks you were doing simultaneously and that's how you end up with 5-10 sessions working on totally unrelated projects.
Sure, but for many folks the distraction is irresistible. It was difficult already to put care and craft into a product, having a slot machine for your attention makes it damn impossible.
Any reason why they indexed on Kimi K2.5 model? I have tried many open-source ones in Opencode, and, in my experience (standard backend development, Java, Python, Spring, etc) Qwen3.6 is SO MUCH BETTER that's shocking. Kimi can't even get most tool calling arguments right.
There's a lead time on models, and there's some tuning gotchas they probably already figured out with Kimi, so they weren't ready to just drop everything and switch. I'm sure they will switch models eventually.
Together with SpaceXAI, we're training a significantly larger model from scratch, using 10x more total compute.
With Colossus 2's million H100-equivalents and our combined data and training techniques, we expect this to be a major leap in model capability.
Kimi 2.5 has the best long context. For raw coding benchmark scores you can just post train on top of it with more specialized data. 2.5 is kinda old, 2.6 is the current release which is exactly just that and catches up to the frontier in most aspects.
I still haven’t seen any other models be as complete as Claude inside Claude Code. I bet Anthropic knows this and they turn the knobs and see people’s reactions… I have been planning with Qwen3.6 Max inside opencode, absolutely game changer.
Opus can then follow the plan quite detailed and like this I can make progress on my toy apps on Pro plan at 20/mo.
For work, unlimited usage via Bedrock.
Yes I’d like to get more usage out of my personal sub, but at 20/mo no complains
I’ve been using Opus 4.6 extensively inside Claude Code via AWS Bedrock with max effort for a few months now (since release).
I’ve found a good “personal harness” and way of working with it in such a way that I can easily complete self contained tasks in my Java codebase with ease.
Now idk if it’s just me or anything else changed, but, in the last 4/5 days, the quality of the output of Opus 4.6 with max effort has been ON ANOTHER LEVEL.
ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! It seems to reason deeper, verifies the work with tests more often, and I even think that it compacted the conversations more effectively and often. Somehow even the quality of the English “text” in the output felt definitely superior. More crisp, using diagrams and analogies to explain things in a way that it completely blew me away. I can’t explain it but this was absolutely real for me.
I’d say that I can measure it quite accurately because I’ve kept my harness and scope of tasks and way of prompting exactly the same, so something TRULY shifted.
I wish I could get some empirical evidence of this from others or a confirmation from Boris…. But ISTG these last few days felt absolutely incredible.
This thread is very confusing. Everyone is saying diametrically opposed things. But I think this may be a clue: AWS bedrock means api billing, no? I’m guessing those complaining about the recently lowered quality of Claude are on subscriptions. And those who are still loving Claude are on work accounts.
Couldn’t read the entire comments but, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive so far.
I think what helps me be effective is a combination of factors: I work only in a modern, well-documented and well-architected Java codebase with over 80% test coverage.
I only use Claude Code with Opus 4.6 on High Effort.
I always, ALWAYS treat my “new job” as writing a detailed ticket for whatever it is I need to do.
I give the model access to a DB replica of my prod DB that I create manually.
I do NOT waste time with custom agents, Claude.md files or any of that stuff.
When I put ALL of the above together, the results ARE THE PROMISED LAND: I simply haven’t written a single line of code manually in the last 3 months.
I find this pretty interesting. I am curious though: Did you dislike coding? You sound genuinely excited to not be doing it anymore.
For me I have been a coder since a very young age and I am nearing the end of my career now. I still love writing code to problem solve just as much as the first day I learnt to code. The thought of something taking that task away from me doesn't fill me with glee.
A parallel for me is if I enjoyed puzzle pages and those brought me with joy and satisfaction employing my grey matter to solve, I just wouldn't find it interesting to have an agent complete the forms to me, with me simply guiding the agent to clues.
Replying once again for future reference to make my position clear: I firmly believe that one MUST experience programming on its own first. No LLMs, no crutches. One MUST feel the abstractions melting away and things clicking in the brain first.
The design becoming obvious. Being able to remove that extra if statement after clarifying requirements with a customer face to face.
A design pattern fitting a scenario like a glove, etc, etc.
You need REAL experience that only comes with time and effort. Years or decades, different businesses, different companies, etc.
But once you have crossed that chasm and that rite of passage, using LLMs becomes a true multiplier and my experience quite fun.
Using them blindly or without experience is a very different thing I can imagine.
I like problem solving and building useful things for our customers. Coding for me was always more of a “means to an end” than pure craft on its own. Obviously some standard, good and clean code pops up when you’re working in things to be extended or maintained by others, but, truth be told, ego battling in code reviews gets boring very fast and additionally, no matter how much I like experimenting with things, if I have an hypothesis, I can now validate it in 2 days instead of 1 week, which means I can validate double the hypothesis.
I am extremely excited about that! Coding in itself as the act of manually typing things? Absolutely not
C'mon let's be real here, there's either "testing AI skills" versus "using AI agents like you would on the daily".
The signal got from leetcode is already dubious to assert profeciency and it's mostly used as a filter for "Are you willing to cram useless knowledge and write code under pressure to get the job?" just like system design is. You won't be doing any system design for "scale" anywhere in any big tech because you have architects for that nor do you need to "know" anything, it's mostly gatekeeping but the truth is, LLMs democratized both leetcode and system design anyway. Anyone with the right prompting skills can now get to an output that's good for 99% of the cases and the other 1% are reserved for architecs/staff engineers to "design" for you.
The crux of the matter is, companies do not want to shift how they approach interviews for the new era because we have collectively believed that the current process is good enough as-is. Again, I'd argue this is questionable given how sometimes these services break with every new product launch or "under load" (where YO SYSTEM DESIGN SKILLZ AT).
