miniblog.

My default assumption is that external libraries are better than what I (or an LLM) would write in a v1. The extra effort to publish a project generally signifies that the author has spent a good amount of time on the problem. I end up prompting LLMs to prefer external code.

Today I learnt that Emacs will do a best-effort parse of expressions in comments too, unless you set parse-sexp-ignore-comments. That's all well and good until org.el has ASCII smileys! https://github.com/bzg/org-mode/blob/4d8d7d6cb42e388572b4f5d227e9b3c9da6ca4a7/lisp/org.el#L4815-L4816 ("unbalanced paren")

I suspect the ratio of commit message characters to changed code characters is directly proportional to the debugging effort required.