Watching my 9-year-old make a game in PICO-8 by painstakingly copying Lua code character by character from examples. Just like how I learned to code when I was a kid. He knows AI exists, but doesn't know it can write code, and I'm not telling him yet 🙂

My copy of "The Psychology of Software Teams" by @grimalkina.bsky.social just arrived. Already read the first few pages and can tell it's gonna be a good read.

Best thing I've built for myself with Claude Code: An Apple Watch app I use for capturing ideas while out on long walks. I talk to my watch, it takes transcription, runs it through LLM, and spits out a cleaned up version in Markdown. Saves to iCloud. All on-device AI using CoreML.

📝 AI has made it easier than ever to start things, and harder than ever to finish. seanvoisen.com/thinking/202...

Remember when you used to pay a one-time license fee for great software, and then owned it for life? Wondering if we'll see a resurgence of that pricing model in the coming years.

How I explain Claude Code to non-techies: "It's a very expensive computer program for generating other computer programs."

Local inference remains largely ignored. You can run 35B Qwen on an M5 Max today, and consumer hardware will improve. I suspect in a few years the default will be local-first inference with escalation to frontier models as needed. Anyway, worth a read: backofmind.substack.com/p/tokenalysi...

This should be a golden age of robust, reliable software. But so far that doesn't seem to be happening. I pointed Fable 5 at a personal Rust project last night. It identified 2 possible crashes and a few points of possible failure related to data corruption and DB writes I hadn't even noticed.

About half-way through "On the Calculation of Volume" (Book I). Quiet, slow, meditative, repetitive, deep focus on seemingly mundane details ... a welcome reprieve to the pace of *everything else* in the world right now. Great way to wind down an evening.

Guess I need to write a blog post about why "prototyping in production" using AI is not the panacea everyone seems to think it is for the supposed problem of "designer-developer hand-off."

"Building things is easy. Evaluating what you build is hard. It requires lots of attention. Therefore, build things that you want to pay lots of attention to." Never has this been more true in software. akkartik.name/post/tmol

Hello #AcademicSky #ResearchSky, I'm building a new, local-first library/citation manager (for fun). Zotero is great, but I've long wanted something more modern. I have a lot working: auto metadata hygiene, local LLM, full-text search, semantic similarity, plugins. But, I'm not a researcher! (1/2)

Turned 45 today. It's been a little quiet on my blog, so in honor of the day, I made a little list of 45 things I have enjoyed in my life, and feel more people should try or know about. seanvoisen.com/writing/fort...

Me to every LLM: Say “it's not just a ___, it’s a ___” one more time. I dare you. I double dare you.

Been increasingly curious how writers and academics manage reading and sources across long projects. Heard everything from "pristine Zotero libraries" to "a folder of PDFs I'll organize someday." If juggling sources is part of your work and you're up for it, I'd love a 15-20 min chat.

📝 Snow, rest, and the strange drug of ungrounded, non-sentient language. Plus a few links and things. Just sent my latest newsletter (published monthly) to my subscriber list. seanvoisen.com/moonpointing...

📝 My contribution to the discourse on the software industry's favorite topic du jour. seanvoisen.com/writing/prog...

Most talk about agentic coding is about technics and productivity, not enough about how it changes the *feel* of the work—the phenomenology of coding. But productivity is a 2nd-order effect of flow state, not just pure capability. Amazing post about exactly this. neonvagabond.xyz/articles/the...

Moon gazing, reading strategies, book recommendations, DIY e-ink typewriters. Moonpointing is my new monthly newsletter with personal updates, things I'm reading, links and other fun things I don't often put on my blog. Check it out if you like that kind of thing! seanvoisen.com/moonpointing...

Every single day in the U.S. is infuriating. What to do: Know your neighbors; invite them to dinner. Contact your senators. Bear witness. Get a whistle. Attend a protest. Vote every congressperson who funded this out of office. Give your distracted coworkers some patience and grace. Abolish ICE.

I mostly gave up on self-hosting things last year because all the maintenance became another chore I didn't want to make time for. Yesterday, though, I discovered PikaPods. "Self-hosting" without the fuss. Perfect. www.pikapods.com

📝 We Computers is a novel narrated by an AI poet. It's the strangest and most thought-provoking book I've ever read about machine authorship. Part book review, part philosophical journey, this was an incredibly fun but challenging essay to write. seanvoisen.com/writing/cosm...

Working on a new essay and I'm trying out Oliver Burkeman's editing method: Print out the first draft, delete everything, and re-type it all back in. Works surprisingly well!

Whenever I sit down to write, I always discover I don't know what I thought I knew. Writing is both a process of thinking and of learning, that's the pain of it. Italo Calvino, from his essay "Why Do You Write?" in which he called writing a "violence against myself."

Trying a new experiment: tracking my book reads for 2026 as a thread right here 📚🤓 If you're looking for new things to read this year, feel free to follow along! Here we go ...

📝 My personal year in review. Got it done, just under the wire. seanvoisen.com/writing/2025...

Suzuki Roshi with some words of wisdom that I always feel are very apt this time of year. If you're planning a new habit, taking on a new practice, going for some resolution in the new year, do so with your "whole body and mind." "Burn yourself completely."

My reading stack for the holidays: Continuing through Yuk Hui’s “A Question Concerning Technology in China,” revisiting Borges, and hoping to crack the cover on Frederic Gros’ “A Philosophy of Walking.”

One of the habits I hope to cultivate next year is to write every single day. Trying to resist the mindset that each word must always lead somewhere, that each thing must be "publishable." Really appreciated the perspective on writing as practice in this essay. www.late-review.com/p/the-own-wo...

In 2025 I both read more books and wrote more blog posts by changing one habit: I stopped using devices with glowing screens or an internet connection after dinner.

📝 Intelligent agents. Stochastic parrots. Blurry JPEGs of the web. We reach for metaphors as cognitive shorthand for the complexity of AI. A few thoughts on the many metaphors we use for LLMs, with a suggestion that maybe the best one comes from Borges. seanvoisen.com/thinking/202...

My team at Adobe is hiring a web components engineer to help us build out the future of our design system. Great opportunity for someone earlier in their career to jump in and help us continue to improve Spectrum Web Components. In-office hybrid in LA, Denver or NYC. adobe.design/jobs/job-pos...

I already gave my book recommendations for 2025, but if I could add 1 more it would be this: "We Computers" is an Uzbek novel about a French programmer-poet who writes an AI system for generating Persian poetry. Beautiful Eastern literary perspective on tech mostly dominated by Western discourse.

One of my end-of-year blogging traditions is to share a few of my favorite books from the past year. Here’s a few I feel are worth your time. seanvoisen.com/writing/2025...

📝 With the clock came the atomization of time through the invention of the minute. With LLMs comes the atomization of computation through the concept of the "token." Some quick thinking out loud on the parallels and differences. seanvoisen.com/thinking/202...

Adding to the reading queue. I work with a few designers. Do I actually want to know how they think? We shall see ... 😉

📝 New post: What started as a 60-day life habit experiment learning and writing about philosophy became something else—neither hobby nor work, but "serious leisure." Also ... polished up my site design, including better typography for long-form reading. seanvoisen.com/blog/not-a-h...

Took the day off. If you need me, I'll be over here at the local coffee shop, polishing up my personal site's design & typography, and (hopefully) finish some neglected drafts of new essays.

Excited to dig into my copy of "Context Window" by @scottboms.bsky.social. Awesome little book with thoughts on computing and quotes from Wendell Berry, Lewis Mumford, the Unix philosophy—just my kind of thing. Came with a bunch of cool stickers and riso prints too.

📝 New in my ongoing "philosophy for designers" series, some design interventions for "lingering" and contemplation, inspired by Byung-Chul Han's "The Scent of Time." seanvoisen.com/blog/design-...

📝 The third post in my ongoing series on "Philosophy for Designers" is now up. A little bit of a side quest here, looking at what the post impressionist painter Cézanne might have to teach us about philosophy and design. seanvoisen.com/blog/cezanne...

📝 Happy Sunday! New post in my Philosophy for Designers series is now up. Continuing down the phenomenology rabbit hole, looking at how the "structural form of parts and wholes" might be useful in UX design. seanvoisen.com/blog/parts-w...

📝 Just posted the first in my series on "Philosophy for Designers," which is my attempt to read, learn and share about philosophy and design in the open. A quick primer on the school of philosophy called phenomenology, written for anyone who designs digital things. seanvoisen.com/blog/phenome...

📝 Just published my monthly personal update, with a few recommended reads. seanvoisen.com/blog/recentl...

A former colleague and I have started engaging in a practice he calls "pair reading" and it's been really great. He describes it as "pair programming for intellectual exploration." Basically, it's a book club of two people. Pick a book, read it together, and talk about it as you go. That's it.

📝 Sharing my current project for after hours self-studies, a little something I'm calling "Philosophy for Designers." seanvoisen.com/blog/introdu...

📝 A quick note inspired by Frank Chimero's recent blog post reflecting on his sabbatical. seanvoisen.com/stream/2025-...

Pro tip for anyone working in a large organization: Be kind to executive assistants. Use the words please and thank you.

📝 Kicking off my second life habit experiment: "self-directed study." seanvoisen.com/blog/habit-e...

📝 Well ... it's been 30 days and life habit experiment №1 "analog evenings" has concluded. I wrote a brief follow-up and reflection on how it went. seanvoisen.com/blog/habit-e...