The Cringe Is Dead Long Live The Cringe

1) Figured this out.

I mass deleted 3 months of Al generated code last week. Here is what I learned. Three months of building a side project almost entirely with Al assistance. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, the works. Shipped fast, felt productive, everything seemed fine. Then I needed to add a feature that touched most of the codebase. And I realized I could not do it. Not because it was hard, but because I did not actually understand how my own project worked. The Al had generated clean looking code with consistent patterns, but the patterns were not mine. I could not trace the logic from memory. I could not explain to someone else why a function was structured the way it was. Every time I tried to modify something I had to re-read everything like it was someone else's code. Because it was. So l deleted about 70% of it and rewrote it from scratch. Took two weeks. The result is simpler, half the lines of code, and I actually understand every piece of it.

Sea Trek: Voyager

When the brand-new Siennese ship Viareggio is sent to deal with some corsairs on an island near Bajor, everything seems like it's going swimmingly. But after she enters a vicious storm in the Atlantic and exits it just southeast of Australia, her intrepid crew must set about on a long journey home. Along the way, they will encounter sea monsters, ghost ships, islands with all manner of peoples, and a massive zombie pirate fleet bent on taking the vessel and everything on it!

Caterina Jacobini: Basically just Janeway’s character in the da Vinci simulations, I guess.

Seven o’ Nine: Cured zombie.

Mr. Neely: A Scottish castaway who has invented strange new recipes from the limited resources of his island.

Kes: A mermaid who kept Neely company while he was stranded.

Tuvok: A member of the ancient Cult of Vulcan, which was blessed with great wisdom and long life by the eponymous Roman fire god.

Tom of Paris: A wisecracking, occasionally irresponsible, but talented helmsman.

Ha-jun Kim: Fresh-faced, eager eternal ensign.

Chalmecatl: A Nahua former pirate captain who raided Spanish galleons, now Jacobini’s second-in-command.

B’Elanna Torres: A half-human, half-shark engineer. I thought a tiger shark fit her personality best.

Probus: A ghostly Roman doctor kept in a terracotta jar.

Queen of the Dead: Leader of the zombies pursuing the ship, the Queen is determined to reassimilate Seven.

Naomi Whaleman: “How do I put a new spin on Naomi? … Screw it, just make her a narwhal.”

Icheb: Another de-zombified crewmember, recognizable by the barnacles permanently embedded on his nose and forehead.

Probus’ mobile emitter: crab