Mid brain takes on the world of software development.
There’s a graphic making the rounds right now. You’ve probably seen it. It’s a radar chart showing the difference between what AI theoretically could do across various job categories versus what people are actually using it for.
The astronauts who circled the moon in 1968 could still see Earth. They were farther from home than anyone had ever been, but when they looked back, there it was - blue and white and impossibly fragile against the black. They knew the math. They knew the trajectory would bring them home. But they’d never actually been that far before. Beyond low Earth orbit, past the point where you could fix…
We don’t build cathedrals anymore. Do we even know how?
Three months ago I would have dismissed claims that AI could replace developers. Today, after using Claude Opus 4.5, I believe AI coding agents can absolutely replace developers.
Beast Mode 3.1 is here. What is Beast Mode? Great question! It is a custom chat mode for VS Code that turns your agent into a Beast. 👉 Get Beast Mode Here’s how it works. Grab the raw markdown from this gist. In VS Code, go the “agent” dropdown in chat and select “Configure Modes”. Select “Create new custom chat mode file”. Choose “User Data Folder”. (this makes it global to all projects) Paste…
Disclaimer: This article is mostly satire. I don’t think Copilot is going to replace you, nor do I think you should engage in any of the suggested behaviour. Feel free to wildly misinterpret my views to maximize engagement. You’ve probably seen all the articles telling you how to “supercharge your development workflow” with GitHub Copilot. “Write code faster!” they say. “Boost productivity!”…
Prompt engineering - or should I say “Prompt Negotiation” - is (currently) an important part of productivity with AI. Your success working with tools like GitHub Copilot is gonna be directly related to how well you prompt it. GitHub Copilot does try to handle as much of the prompt engineering for you behind the scenes as it can, but just like all your passive agressive relationships, you need to…
I’ve had a lot of blogs over the years. I think I started on Wordpress (as one does) and then moved to Tumblr (yes, that happened) and then to my own site, then to Medium when that was the thing to do and now I’m coming to you from GitHub Pages. Having seen a lot of…stuff…I can tell you that GitHub Pages/Jekyll is all you need. Let me make my case. Markdown is probably the best way to compose…
There’s a lot of debate these days on whether or not AI generated code is a good thing. People are quite worried about the volume of code being written by AI right now, and how that’s going to affect us all in this field down the road. Most developers don’t get to work on new projects - they maintain and build on existing ones. What will it be like to maintain these things when most of that code…
My father passed away suddently in April of 2021 almost to the day of his 76th birthday. An otherwise healthy man, he was sitting in the back yard reading and journaling as he often did when began to feel unwell. Returning to the house, he sat down in the living room with my mother in a set of recliners that sit next to each other to google his symptoms. When my mother asked if he was feeling…