Teaching AI Like a Junior Dev: 4 Leadership 4.0 Moves

14 June 2026 by susiloharjo

Team collaboration and leadership communication concept

A few weeks back I sat through a corporate leadership training on “the four dimensions of digital leadership.” I went in expecting corporate fluff. I came out realizing something that has been nagging me ever since: the same moves the trainer taught for managing junior engineers are the same moves I keep needing to get an AI to actually understand me. Same pattern, same cost of getting it wrong, same fix.

I was thinking about it over my morning coffee this week: giving instructions to an AI feels exactly like onboarding a junior dev who joined yesterday. Sometimes one sentence lands. Sometimes I explain the same thing three times, slightly differently each time, and the output still comes back wrong. It’s not that the AI is stupid. It’s not that the junior dev is slow. It’s that I might not be a great communicator — and that gap is mine to close, not theirs.

The framework I learned is called Leadership 4.0. It has four dimensions: Freshmen Leader, Technology Leader, Social Leader, and Digital Leader. Used together, they help you diagnose whether the communication gap is on the sender’s side, the receiver’s side, or somewhere in the handoff. Here is how I now use them — at work with junior devs, and at home with my AI assistants.

How to Fix Linux Menu Icons for Portable Electron Apps

14 June 202613 June 2026 by susiloharjo

Linux desktop menu showing an Electron application shortcut with its icon properly rendered beside the system tray

How to Fix Linux Menu Icons for Portable Electron Apps

You downloaded a Linux app as a portable folder or a raw binary — Antigravity IDE, a portable VS Code, a side-loaded Electron tool. You wrote a .desktop file, dropped it in ~/.local/share/applications/, and the app is gone from the menu. The launcher grid shows nothing. The search box finds nothing. You open the .desktop file and the Icon= line points at a perfectly valid PNG discover how 3 bash aliases saved me 10 hours last week, yet the system acts like the icon does not exist learn how to resize your Ubuntu VM disk step by step.

The problem is almost never the icon file. The problem is whitespace in the path.

GNOME, KDE, and most freedesktop-compliant desktop environments parse .desktop files with a config parser that is unusually strict about spaces. A path like /home/ubuntu/Downloads/Antigravity IDE/resources/app/resources/linux/code.png will silently fail to load for two reasons: the unquoted space inside Icon= breaks the parser, and even when the parser survives, the desktop file validator (which runs when update-desktop-database regenerates the cache) treats the entry as malformed and drops it.

I burned an hour on this the first time. The second time I wrote the fix down. This is the four-step version that survives every Electron portable app I have thrown at it.

I Set 2 Playwright Goals at 4 AM and Both Beat Fajr

14 June 202613 June 2026 by susiloharjo

Browser window with Python Playwright code on a desk in the dim light of pre-dawn, a closed Quran beside the keyboard

I Set 2 Playwright Goals at 4 AM and Both Beat Fajr

This Saturday morning I woke up at 4 AM with the kind of half-baked idea that only survives a brain that hasn’t fully booted. I wanted to see if I could give an LLM a real browser three AI code review tools I run before every PR, a goal written in two sentences, and walk away. Not a toy. Not a sandbox. LinkedIn. Tokopedia. The real web, with logins and JavaScript and the kind of DOM that makes scrapers cry learn how rogue AI processes can eat your server.

By the time I finished praying Fajr and closed my Quran, both jobs were done. One returned 23 LinkedIn profiles as structured JSON. The other returned 14 G-Shock listings under Rp 1.000.000 from Jakarta sellers offering instant payment. I had not touched the keyboard.

This is the prompt pattern that made it work — and the three things I almost got wrong.

5 Things I Stopped Doing as a Lead

12 June 202612 June 2026 by susiloharjo

I led a small engineering team for two years. We shipped on time, the code was clean, and the standups were short. By every metric I cared about, the team looked fine. Then three of my best engineers quit within a month. None of them had a single conversation with me before they handed in their notice.

The exit interviews told me what I should have seen earlier. They were not burned out by the work. They were burned out by the way I gave it to them.

I spent the next six months rebuilding how I delegated. I read four books on engineering management. I ran a one-on-one feedback survey every Friday for twelve weeks. I shipped a working team again, and the difference was not subtle.

Here are the five delegation habits I had to kill. If you are a tech lead and any of these feel familiar, the exit interview pattern will too.

Why a Simple If-Else Can Beat an LLM

12 June 2026 by susiloharjo

Code logic: simple if-else flow chart contrasting with LLM API endpoint

Why a Simple If-Else Can Beat an LLM

TL;DR: When you can describe the inputs and the expected outputs in advance, you don’t need a model — you need a function. Here’s the principle, the proof, and the one case where the principle breaks.

A teammate burned $47 of API credits last quarter on a “smart” classifier. The job: sort incoming support emails into four buckets (billing, technical, account, other) and route them to the right Slack channel. The model nailed it about 91% of the time. The remaining 9% it was confidently, hilariously wrong — sending a billing dispute to the technical channel, an outage report to “other.”

I replaced it with a 40-line Python script using if and a handful of keyword checks. It runs in 12 milliseconds per email, costs $0, and gets the same 91% — except the 9% it gets wrong are predictably wrong, so we know to watch them. The classifier used to hallucinate categories that didn’t exist. The script never invents a fifth bucket.

That’s not an edge case. That’s the principle: when the parameters are already known, deterministic code is the right answer. The question is why this works, and when it stops working.

Anthropic Shipped Two New Models. They’re the Same Model.

12 June 202611 June 2026 by susiloharjo

TL;DR: Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 (general availability) and Claude Mythos 5 (restricted, cyber defenders only) on June 9, 2026. Same underlying model. Different safety posture. $10/M input tokens and $50/M output — less than half the price of Mythos Preview. Part 1 of 2: specs and use cases. Part 2 will be the review after I have run something real on it.

I opened Anthropic’s newsroom on Tuesday and saw two new flagship models. Then I read the second paragraph and realized they were the same model.

That is the structural fact nobody is writing about. The release notes, the benchmark table, the customer quotes — all of that is downstream of one decision Anthropic made: a single frontier model, packaged twice. Once for everyone. Once for the people with a clear reason to be dangerous.

The packaging is the product. Let me walk you through what’s actually shipping, what the safeguards mean in practice, and what I want to test once the access thaws.