contemplating "principle of least software" a key source of slop is creating more software than needed to achieve its aim e.g. building an electron app with auth when a cli tool would do. we do this because it is so cheap to create software. there is a lack of back-pressure.

i've been preserving agent threads for when the thing they've built gets broken - just return to the original thread and tell it to restore the feature. it got me thinking: what if i had a directory of these threads that served as a kind of regression suite?

RP2350 as the MCU co processor on the Flipper one 👀

🎉 TinyBase v8.3 - the one with @solidjs.com! Primitives and components to work with Solid - just like you can with React & Svelte! Major props to Daniel Grant (@djgrant.bsky.social) for the hard work to get this going!

Talking to a model that seems eerily human? BUG! This is very similar to the skeuomorphism trend that accompanied the launch of the iPhone. And once it has served its purpose it needs to be burned with fire. substack.com/home/post/p-...

conveniently, the market for people who think they have good taste is quite large

just saying

these two positions are irreconcilable: 1. tech debt doesn't matter 2. context is really important tech debt *is* context! code is an ontological representation of the thing you are building. if it's not coherent, you are literally feeding your agent a million bad prompts

haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-su... not wrong

those who *rely* on AI for guidance will have a painful collision with reality

Annnd the blog posts have been published! 🐝 Find them on my website in the little writing nook 💖 jclahoot.com?position=%7B...

I wrote about some things I'm struggling with in the technology industry, preceded by an appreciation for folk music.

Always building, never shipping danielgrant.co/posts/always...

how quickly we regressed from not reviewing the code to not reviewing the strike target

Claude stuck fixing a bug. No problem. I can deal with this. Roll up sleeves. Open codebase. Oh good god

You Are Going To Make It – advice for junior developers. danielgrant.co/posts/gmi

Like a siren, the closer you get to an LLM, the harder it becomes to peceive what it actually is.

Codex 5.3: "This epic improves review throughput with concrete fixes, not aesthetic refactors" Me: "That is a bullshit statement" Codex 5.3: "Agreed. I'II replace it with concrete, non-bullshit wording and tighten the whole epic to explicit problems"

thinking about why openclaw blew up 1. people love talking to agents with a persistent personality 2. perhaps the first maintstream example of a self-improving software environment the personal assistant part wasn't new

if everyone has a personal agent, collective action becomes a much less tractable problem. people already have aligned goals; it's the coordination that's tricky. agents can probably help here. that could have consequences.

amazing how fast we transitioned from "everything should be rewritten in rust for memory safety" to "I ship code I will never read"

it's so tempting with ai to build the superficially functional version first. build the hard bit first. the facade will emerge naturally.

The predicted revolution must always be imminent; the reason to hand over money immediate.

Claude Code should have a team of 5-10 engineers. Instead they're hiring dozens of operators to manage LLMs. Absolutely bonkers.

til there's a cross-platform compiler that runs on bare metal – it's like java but with no interpreter or vm github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

well now that programming is over I guess we just spend all day writing instructions for the computer to execute

The two-year long narrative that software engineers didn't adopt AI coding because they were in denial is now obvious horseshit. Once the models got good enough the industry pivoted on a dime. No-one in their right mind would write code with sonnet 3.7.

I'm not vibe coding, I'm navigating agents through vector space

i love that i am on both of these lists, and they're next to each other in order of me being added this perfectly sums up bsky users lol

🙋‍♂️ so ... for reasons: I would love to know people's frustrations with: - the current npmjs.com - admin user flows on npm web ui (and cli, locally) 🙏

As per tradition, a new word for the year. danielgrant.co/posts/daniel...

For those concerned with the environmental, social and economic issues surrounding AI, intellectual honesty is so important rn. We're drowning in bad hot takes, but the answer to that is not more bad hot takes in the opposite direction; it's rigorous investigation into what these systems can do.

Startup postmortems are two-a-penny. Failed to execute, got beaten by competition, ran out of cash – select as appropriate. A founder postmortem though… What happens when the world you constructed crumbles right in front of you? Here's my answer: danielgrant.co/posts/a-year...

Some questions for the AI Alchemists out there danielgrant.co/posts/what-a...

There are two types of hard problems: 1. Problems that are hard to solve and remain hard after solving (e.g. particle physics) 2. Problems that are hard to solve but seem utterly obvious after solving (e.g. naming things) Software development is a whole lot of #2

First version of OpenAI website dub.sh/iFgdW5y "Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be ... broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely." Wonder what their 2015 selves would think of today

I spent three months living in Saskatchewan when I was 19 and quickly learned how resourceful and resilient Canadians can be. This is the real deal. I wouldn't bet against them even if they were in a good mood.

Anthropic's latest "paper" is both extremely readable and a masterclass in interactive design. transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribu...

This genuinely works. I wonder if it activates the anterior midcingulate cortex (brain region associated with will power)

This is unbelievably cool Just keep pressing 'space' to learn how an LLM works

For anyone struggling to understand the impact vibe coding IS having on the industry, I will personally buy you a copy of the mythical man month. In fact I will buy you ten copies. Then you can read it 10x faster.

TypeScript people: Is there a definitely typed package that is the intersection of nodejs types and browser types?

It's our meetup on Tuesday 11th! Come and hear from Sergio on Design Systems with Tailwind 👇 www.meetup.com/glasgow-java...

This has turned out to be really really useful for env governance. Unix philosophy is really powerful

Every time I get cozy letting AI write my code I suddenly find I've spent two days in a doom loop and then it takes like 20 minutes of concentrated effort to fix it myself

New github.com/djgrant/env0 release v.0.3.0: support for .env0.local files Example use-case: overriding a DB env to point to a local database

Had a funny conversation with the pharmacist today comparing pharmacological risk with the risk of flying. Ended with us both declaring, "and that's why you shouldn't read the leaflet"

More Sunday evening hacking on github.com/djgrant/env0 v0.2.1 – introducing -sh flag to run commands in a child shell