Blogs

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? ...

After three months of AI-assisted development, I’m more productive than ever. I’m also mentally exhausted in ways I didn’t expect. The productivity gains are real—I can go from sketch to working prototype in hours instead of days. But there’s a hidden cost that we’re not talking about: the tools fundamentally change the cognitive load of programming. Instead of being tired from wrestling with implementation details, I’m exhausted from operating constantly at the architecture and design level. ...

Something weird happened the other day. I found myself sketching more than I had in years. The pages quickly filled with the doodles, wireframes, and half-formed ideas that used to live in my head until they died of neglect. The reason? I can finally get from sketch to fleshed-out concept fast enough that my ideas don’t evaporate. After a few months of serious AI-assisted development, I’m starting to understand what these tools actually do well, and more importantly, where they will cheerfully lead you off a cliff. They don’t replace thinking, they amplify it. But only if you understand the difference between augmenting your expertise and outsourcing your judgment. ...

After thirty-something years of working in terminals, I’ve developed a pretty strong bias toward doing things from the command line. It can be faster for me to navigate around using scripts and shortcuts than clicking through GUI hierarchies. The muscle memory is there, the automation possibilities are endless, and frankly, it just feels more direct. The problem is that GUI applications don’t always want to cooperate with this workflow. You end up breaking your flow to hunt through Spotlight, dig around in Finder, or, worst of all, try to remember the actual executable path buried somewhere deep in an .app bundle. It’s jarring when you’re in the zone. ...