Recent content in Posts on The Chronicle
I just listened to a Search Engine episode about Waymo and driverless cars
( The Trial of the Driverless Car ), and it made me so angry . Not at
Waymo, though. There has always been tension between people who do a job and the
companies trying to mechanize or automate the job, but all of these people have
been arguing about the wrong thing… And they’ve been doing it for…

 Perhaps you are aware of the popular fast-casual salad shop called Sweetgreen.
They’re a semi-iconic brand here in Boston, and I’ve eaten a metric shit ton 
of their salads. They’re delicious! 
 Yesterday, I walked into a Sweetgreen here in my town in the Boston suburbs—a
location I’d never been in and quite honestly didn’t know was…
Yes, this is a post about Google Antigravity . It’s not about Wicked . But if
you want to listen to that while you read this, that’s fine by me. 
 Yesterday I tried out this new AI-centric IDE from Google and I have…
Thoughts. This will be a mostly unstructured sequence of experiences and
opinions, so if you are looking for something well-researched I’m…
Our bucket overflows with news about the exploits of “vibe coding,” and
journalists are now (apparently) paid by how many times they can fit the word
“agentic” into a piece, because no other explanation makes sense to me. 
 As I’ve written before (somewhere, maybe not here), I use AI and I like AI and I
think we’ll come out the other end of this…
The enshittification of the tech industry is reaching a fever pitch, and it’s
all thanks to AI. Not what AI can do, but what people seem to think it can do. 
 It’s really hard to get a job in tech right now. Surely our industry has gone
through its ups and downs and hiring waxes and wanes alongside interest rates
and how sweaty the many perpetually damp men in the…
AI is not going to replace the majority of programming jobs, full stop. I
roundly reject any argument that presents AI as a solution to converting a set
of business requirements into functioning software. 
 But, if you don’t learn how to use AI, and stay abreast of what it can do, it
may very well replace YOU. Let me put that differently: it will be the reason
your boss…
I have a few blogs, including this one, and over the years I’ve used a few
different platforms. My first ever blog was on WordPress, but now all of my
blogs use Hugo , a static site generator written in Go. 
 The one “downside” to using a static site generator is that you can’t easily do
some of the things that a server-based system can do, like…
I’m a bit of a home automation hobbyist. I bought my first few Philips Hue
lights before anyone knew what Hue was, and I wrote one of the first couple
hundred Amazon Alexa integrations (they even gave me a t-shirt for it!) 
 My house isn’t as jammed with sensors and self-made IoT devices as some of the
folks I’ve seen on YouTube, but I do run Home Assistant and…
We have solar panels on the house, and their energy production is managed by an
Enphase Envoy microinverter system. I love data, so I wanted to build my own
dashboard of energy consumption and production, which took me down
a rabbit hole of dealing with Enphase’s shitty API. 
 Since then, I discovered that the Envoy system does, in fact, serve its energy
data locally, so…
As astute readers are aware, I’ve been on a host my own stuff kick for
some time now. I brought my music local with Navidrome, I moved my remaining
websites off of that-shape-named-service into static sites that I host
myself, and I just moved from Samsung SmartThings to Home Assistant for all my
home automation stuff. 
 A recent household budget discussion wandered into…