Writing helps me think.

Remember autoconf? If you were building software in the late ’90s or early 2000s, you probably have scars. You’d write some configuration rules, run the tool, and out popped a perfectly functional makefile. It felt like magic, until it didn’t. The moment autoconf broke, you were debugging generated shell scripts that stretched for thousands of lines. The abstraction that seemed so elegant suddenly became opaque hell. You needed to understand not just what you wanted, but how the magic worked, where it could fail, and why. ...

There’s a moment in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker that fundamentally changes how you see the game world. You’ve spent dozens of hours sailing between islands, comfortable with the rhythm of ocean exploration. The world feels complete; a vast blue expanse dotted with discoveries. Then you dive beneath the waves for the first time and find Hyrule Castle, perfectly preserved in an air bubble at the bottom of the sea. Suddenly you realize you’ve been sailing over an entire civilization. The ocean wasn’t the world, it was just the surface. ...

I spent three hours last night hand-drawing pixel fonts in Pixen, placing each dot with care. At 8x8 pixels, it was just like the many character sets I designed for my Atari 600XL in the early 1980s. Each pixel mattered then because we only had 128 characters to work with and maybe 16KB of RAM, or up to 64KB if you were lucky enough to have a RAM extension or a more expensive 800XL. Today, each pixel matters for completely different reasons: not because of technical constraints, but because those limitations force a special kind of creativity. ...

I was debugging a power issue with my thermostat last week when it hit me: I had no idea how many batteries were in my house. Not approximately. Not even close. Twenty years ago, I knew exactly where every battery lived; the TV remote, the kitchen clock, maybe a flashlight. Today? They’re everywhere and nowhere. In sensors, in remotes, in devices I’ve forgotten I own. They’ve crossed the threshold from technology to invisible infrastructure. ...

We’ve been watching the AI gold rush unfold for the past two years now, and honestly? It’s giving me serious déjà vu. Remember the early days of mobile apps when everyone and their cousin was building a flashlight app? Or when “on the blockchain” was supposedly going to revolutionize everything from grocery shopping to dental records? We’re in that phase with AI right now. The phase where adding “AI-powered” to your deck is supposed to make VCs throw money at you. Where every developer with a weekend and an OpenAI API key thinks they’re building the next unicorn. Where demos that only work some of the time are being pitched as production-ready solutions. ...

I’ve been thinking about the current AI moment, and I can’t shake the feeling that we’re about to hit a wall. Not a failure wall, more like the wall Web 1.0 hit right before everything changed. Remember when every startup was “webr.com” and the height of innovation was animated GIFs? We’re in the AI equivalent of that era right now. Just as Web 2.0 wasn’t really about AJAX or rounded corners, AI 2.0 won’t be about better chatbots. We’re about to witness a fundamental shift in how AI gets built, deployed, and integrated into our daily tools. And honestly? It can’t come soon enough. ...

Evolution has a weird obsession with crabs. At least five times, nature has taken some random crustacean and said, “you know what would work better? A crab.” But it’s not just crabs, evolution continues to reinvent the wheel. Trees evolved independently more than 40 times. Many different types of eyes appeared in dozens of unrelated lineages. Flight emerged in insects, pterosaurs, birds, and bats, each independently. ...

There’s a feeling you get when everything clicks into place. Not the eureka moment of solving a problem, but something more fundamental: the deep satisfaction of being exactly where you need to be, with exactly what you need, arranged exactly how it should be. It’s the feeling of home, but applied to the spaces where we create. This isn’t about aesthetics or luxury. It’s about something more primal: the human need to nest, to claim territory, to shape our environment until it shapes us back. And nowhere is this more crucial than in the spaces where we do our most demanding creative work. ...

As a hobby, I’ve been perfecting various burger recipes. It both feeds us and gives me something to incrementally improve. Add fake internet points to the mix, and now I’m motivated to post photographs of my creations. The feedback and reinforcement these fake points provide are enough to keep me consistently taking those photos, and making those burgers. A little push can be good. But here’s the thing about fake internet points: they work. Absurdly well. Here I am, a grown adult who builds software for a living, getting genuinely excited because 47 strangers clicked an arrow next to a photo of my latest smash burger creation. The dopamine hit is real, even when I know exactly what’s happening to my brain. ...

Your AI coding assistant hasn’t gotten worse; you’ve just hit the ceiling of what your current approach can handle. “My LLM coding tools have been serving me hot garbage lately” is a complaint I see weekly on Reddit. Same tool, same developer, suddenly worse results. These threads are full of developers convinced their AI assistant has degraded overnight. Same prompts that worked last month suddenly fall over. The tool must be broken, right? ...