When you are the problem

A situation that programmers are all too familiar with. It happens again and again, you are sure you did what you had to do, there must be something wrong with the language or the code, it's lying! After much frustration you figure out that you were doing something silly that was causing the problem you were complaining about. Here's an example that happened to me back in July that might be applicable to others. So I had been trying to optimise the render times of my publishing tool CLI. Something that was taking 5 mins started taking 45 mins. It was horrendous. But after much effort I got the rendering down to 12 seconds. I was very happy, it was so much faster than even what it was previously. But then it doubled to 24 seconds, and so I persevered, for hours and hours, testing everything I could think of. No matter what I did, it was double what it had been. And as I pushed forward things got even worse because the LLM that was helping started suggesting all sorts of crazy ideas,…