Domenic Denicola's website
Since breaking free of my corporate shackles , I’ve gotten to experiment with a variety of approaches to AI-assisted development. After months of tinkering, I’m quite happy with my current setup, and want to capture and share it. Things are changing very fast, and I have no illusions that this will be a timeless nugget of wisdom. But talking to some friends and scrolling through X posts, it does…
I’m a Windows guy; I always have been. One of my first programming books was Beginning Visual C++ 6 , which crucially came with a trial version of Visual C++ that my ten-year-old self could install on my parents’ computer. I remember being on a family vacation when .NET 1.0 came out, working my way through a C# tome and gearing up to rewrite my Neopets cheating programs from MFC into Windows…
In 2013, I started the project of designing a new streams API for JavaScript. The intent was to learn the lessons from Node.js’s streams, including its transition to “streams2” , and create something that could power various under-development web APIs. This site contains some essays from me reflecting on the API’s development, specifically as I worked to grapple with how different underlying…
I’ve maintained the jsdom open-source project for over ten years . It’s essentially a partial implementation of a web browser in Node.js, including complexities like resource loading, styling and scripting, and Web IDL bindings. Along the way I’ve been privileged to invite several talented engineers onto the maintainers team, as they took time from their lives to significantly improve the project.…
Yesterday was my last day at Google and the Chrome team. In fact, I have retired. Over the last 11 years, I’ve worked to improve the web platform, focusing on foundational features where my skills in web standards and API design could make a difference. From my earliest work on promises to my latest work on built-in AI and speculative loading , I’ve tried to push the web forward, taking seriously…
For the last year, I’ve been working as part of the Chrome built-in AI team on a set of APIs to bring various AI models to the web browser. As with all APIs we ship , our goal is to make these APIs compelling enough that other browsers adopt them, and they become part of the web’s standard library. Working in such a fast-moving space brings tension with the usual process for building web APIs.…
METR recently released a paper, “ Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity ”. It was a randomized controlled trial where developers were given some tasks to work on using AI, and some without. The surprising headline result was that developers using AI took on average 19% longer to complete their tasks! ( N = 246 tasks, 95% confidence interval ≈…
Spaced repetition recap Mastering any subject is built on a foundation of knowledge: knowledge of facts, of heuristics, or of problem-solving tactics. If a subject is part of your full-time job, then you’ll likely master it through repeated exposure to this knowledge. But for something you’re working on part-time—like myself learning Japanese —it’s very difficult to get that level of practice. The…
I signed up for my first Japanese class in December 2016. It was a group class at New York’s Japan Society . Since then I’ve been more-or-less continually studying the language, and just over one year ago I moved to Tokyo. You would think 6.5 years of studying would mean I’m pretty good, right? Not so much. The textbooks and standardized tests place my level (~ N2 ) as “between intermediate and…
The gifted sci-fi writer Ted Chiang recently wrote a New Yorker article, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” , with the thesis that large language models like ChatGPT can be analogized to lossy compression algorithms for their input data. I think this analogy is wrong and misleading. Others have done a good job gently refuting it, with plentiful citations to appropriate scientific papers. But a…