This is the key though. Use AI tools on domains you understand well so you can guide them. They accelerate your work. They don’t replace expertise.

Another good one. Nicely done

Issue 48 of my newsletter ships later today. It includes a markdownlint tutorial. Subscribe at https://newsletter.bphogan.com/ to get the latest issue in your inbox.

Just pushed publish on my 4-song Christmas EP. Traditional songs in my style. If you celebrate, give a listen. https://soundcloud.com/bphogan/sets/december

I'm a subscriber, and I can vouch for the fact that it's good. And free, as he said :⁠-⁠)

I have published my newsletter for 47 months straight. Are you subscribed? It’s free. Once a month. newsletter.bphogan.com

The Minnesota Wild plays at the Grand Casino Arena and airs games on FanDuel Sports Network, and we are supposed to be surprised there’s a current sports betting scandal in another sport?

HOW DARE YOU, MR. HOCKEY PLAYER! HOW DARE YOU USE YOUR HOCKEY STICK TO PUT A PUCK IN THE NET! NO GOAL FOR YOU!

I can only be friends with people who are old enough to remember the annoyance of suddenly having to use area codes even for local domestic calls we used to only have to remember seven digits!

Yessss I love AsciiDoc, everyone should use it! It renders natively on GitHub too, by using the .adoc file suffix, so you can even use it for your readmes and the like

Yesterday I published Issue 45 of my monthly newsletter, and it's about why Markdown might not be the best way to implement content. Read it and subscribe to be the first to read next month's issue. https://newsletter.bphogan.com/archive/issue-45-markdown-is-holding-you-back/

You don’t say? https://www.psypost.org/frequent-ai-chatbot-use-associated-with-lower-grades-among-computer-science-students/#

Everyone wants corporate sponsorship of OSS until they find out that sponsorship means control. Do what we want or the money you depend on goes poof. No free lunch. Disappointing. https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/

"Let's all band together to get consumer protections rolled back, and we'll say it will increase competition" is a hell of a sales pitch. https://tinyurl.com/2s44zc9j

Do you remember… The 21st night of September…

Vale is my go-to tool to catch style errors and enforce consistency in content, and after implementing it in multiple jobs and projects, it was time to create a guide anyone can follow. Now in beta. https://pragprog.com/titles/bhvale/write-better-with-vale/

Hyphen: - Underscore: _ Em-dash: — En-dash: – So many dashes…..

You “log in” with your login. Your users “sign up” for your service and you track “signups.” Go check your buttons.

Today, I used ChatGPT o3 to research two articles for my newsletter. Every article it found was current and relevant. Every fact it cited was made-up. The statistics did not appear in the article cited. Content without curation will be painful.

Some things I learned while using Claude Code on some personal projects over the last two weeks. https://bphogan.com/2025/06/19/2025-06-19-claude-code-tips/

With major providers down, this feels like a snow day, where the school's closed and all the work that was due today is now due tomorrow.

Centralizing everything behind a couple of cloud providers really does help us build things faster. But when there's an outage, you really feel it.

Now his hat is on backwards He can show you his tattoos He is in the music business He is calling you….

*sigh*

"...People are beginning to confuse the outputs of generative AI with facts, with knowledge, or with insight.... And here’s the real danger. It’s not just that GenAI gets things wrong. The deeper threat is that we stop noticing when it does."

"pivot to AI" is the new "pivot to video"

Few things are more condescending than trying to do something online and being told you have to call, only to have to listen to the automated system tell you that you can manage your account online. I promise you. I tried. Talking to people is a last resort.

Tailscale has a lot of cool features I didn't know about until I joined, but tsnet (https://tailscale.com/kb/1244/tsnet) is one of the best. With tsnet I can write Go apps that have Tailscale built in. Makes creating internal services so easy. Even on the free plan.

Going to attempt to live stream some music making over at https://www.twitch.tv/bphogan for a bit. Come say hi.

Spring Best Sellers Sale, Week 2 40% Off – This Week Only! Code: 2025testing at checkout pragprog.com/titles/... @bphogan.com

That unfortunate feeling when you check something so many times and only find the blatant spelling mistake after you hit publish. Related news: the new newsletter issue is out.

Instead of an unsubscribe link: “If you wish to stop receiving Windows Insider Program emails, you will need to leave the program.” It’s a newsletter. It’s not account info. Pretty sure “report spam and block sender” is also an option.

#gifflesimpsons380 🍩 1/6 🟩⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ giffle.com/simpsons

What does winning feel like? When you have exactly enough cheese for the last cracker on the plate. No leftover cracker. No leftover cheese.

@bphogan.com I just read your latest issue of Code, Content & Career. On the topic of books being important in the “age of LLMs”, I couldn’t agree more. I will always rely on books for learning. Authors & their team are heavily vetted professionals. They are experts and provide sources of truth.

Signal has great video call quality. Sharing this info today for no particular reason.

Did something happen to ChatGPT? It’s been making more and more stuff up and arguing with me. Or worse, showing me the same wrong answer repeatedly. Even o1 when I correct it or show it context from docs.

I’ve often thought about live stream writing a chapter of a book or article. But then nobody wants to watch me swear at the computer while I try to figure out why yet another “documented” feature doesn’t actually work the way the docs says it should.

Software development's the first profession that can have an impact on this kind of scale. Literally one person can wreak havoc with a few keystrokes.

Just because you are an expert at what you do does not mean you are an expert at explaining what you do.

No, I don't need a bloody copilot for this document, thank you. Writing is, in no small part, a tool for thinking. If you outsource that element to a machine that cannot think, you shouldn't be surprised if, at the end of the process, neither you nor your reader are any the wiser.

I don’t work there anymore but I just ported my Temporal demo to the beta Ruby SDK they just released. https://github.com/napcs/temporal-tutorial-ipgeo-ruby Ruby + Temporal + Sinatra + HTMX. Find your location via IP. Oh folks Temporal plus Ruby is a game changer for me.

In this, the year 2025, I urge you to question everything they're trying to sell you re: genAI. I can code with the best of them and can create neural networks. And I can also tell you 99% of what these tech people are trying to sell you is fake/hype/lies. And that brilliant idea? Someone else's.

First day at @tailscale.com today. I'll be leading documentation there.

VSCode has so many great extensions. I am missing out. But I find it so slow. I’m so used to the speed I get from vim and tmux integration I set up. VSCode has a decent vim plugin but it all just feels so much slower to me.

The shoemaker's children have no shoes. The last 2.5 years at work have kept me super busy. Now that I'm funemployed for a few weeks I can focus on things I've been meaning to do. Today I'm writing Vale rules to enforce my personal writing style for my content.

Yesterday was my last day at @temporalio. I'm unemployed through the rest of the year, but I have a new thing starting in January. Temporal is great tech and I'll keep using it. I even used it to send this message to multiple platforms.

This is good: “AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power.” ali-alkhatib.com/blog/definin...

Any time someone mentions RoR not scaling, there's Shopify setting records every single year in payments & shipments processed. And the market-leading version control site is on it as well. (RoR IS delightful to use - I realize every time I try it out again!)

"I'm immune to marketing," he says as he peers over his laptop which is bedazzled in so many corporate logos that a NASCAR driver would blush.