Thoughts on technology, design, and the craft of building digital products.
The client asks the question while you're still setting up the presentation. "Is this AI?" They say it lightly, like they're asking about the coffee. But there's weight behind it, and you both know it...
I asked an agent to make a hero video for Argus. I gave it the codebase, the landing pages, the documentation. I did not give it a creative direction, a shot list, a mood board, or a script. I said, m...
I'm an engineer and builder juggling multiple software projects at once. Earlier this year, I started using [Paperclip](https://paperclip.ing), an open-source agent orchestration platform, to manage t...
I spent a few hours tonight giving my AI assistant an email address. Not so it could write emails for me. Not to pipe newsletters through Claude and get summaries. I gave it an email address so that w...
Anthropic [announced Code Review for Claude Code](https://www.threads.com/@claudeai/post/DVrOfogkWbV) this week. When a PR opens, Claude dispatches agents to hunt for bugs. I've been doing this since ...
975 emails in the confirm queue. Not spam — the classifier handled spam. Not shipping notifications or LinkedIn job alerts — it handled those too. These were the ambiguous ones, the ones Claude wasn't...
The development loop I've landed on for [Picket](https://sellwithpicket.com): I write the spec. Claude turns the spec into tests. Claude turns the tests into code. The code ships to CI. If anything br...
I had over seven thousand unread emails in my inbox. Not spam — [Fastmail](https://join.fastmail.com/87aac080) handles spam fine. These were the other kind. The ones that exist only to be ignored. Lin...
I wrote [a post on Monday](/2026/02/10/a-hundred-commits-and-a-nap.html) about shipping a hundred commits in a week and collapsing into bed. Then I woke up Tuesday and did it again. This isn't part tw...
I shipped about a hundred commits last week. Multi-tenant architecture, self-service signup, Stripe billing with tier enforcement, a marketing site with features and pricing pages, product screenshots...
I have 8,597 audio samples. Kicks, snares, synths, weird textures I downloaded once and forgot about. They live in folders named "Drums_Final_v2" and "MISC_GOOD" and "sort_later." The Polyend Play+ is...
Remember when I was excited about [self-hosted CI on Fly.io](/2026/01/31/self-hosted-ci-flyio.html)? That lasted about 24 hours. The setup worked. The runner registered, jobs ran, tests passed. But th...
I wanted to use WarpBuild for faster CI, but it only works for organization repos. Mine's personal. So I needed another option. GitHub Actions works fine, but I'm burning through minutes on E2E tests....
I asked an AI to help me reimagine my personal site. Not redesign — reimagine. I didn't describe a vision or list requirements. I just said "reimagine what a personal website can be." The AI didn't ge...
I was recently putting together a payment processing flow. The kind of form where you collect user info, maybe some additional details from a third party, process a deposit via Authorize.Net, send con...
Whenever I get down on my job, I need to remember I've incorporated command line tools called '[asdf](https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf)' and '[thefuck](https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck)' into my regular life, and that I'm using computers the right way to just think less about the things I don't want to think about while getting work done.
If you're in a web development job where you find yourself occasionally writing HTML, CSS and Javascript in the style of what may be disparagingly called *spaghetti code* — code that presumably works ...
the internet was good to me today
Did you never tell your phone, "Hey Siri, scan a document," and then watch it pull up the document scanning UI? You didn't buy an app, you weren't marketed to or tracked, you didn't do anything except...
We moved to a JiT model for laundry and it a) is better and b) sure makes it look like I have too many clothes.
Full-stack engineer sure is a fancy way to write “generalist.”
Behold the Apple Vision Pro. The first new product category from Apple that I haven't immediately bought into on Day One in many, many years. I see the potential. I really do. It may not be for everyo...
DISCLAIMER: This is not advice. Don't do dumb shit on the internet like I do from time to time. Sometimes I buy things on the internet that need to be discreet. Sending things too. I've done it bot...
Time was you got to the end of the internet. Not the wholee internet of course, but the blogs, sites, feeds and newsletters you cared about. For white collar workers of a certain age in the beginning...
My yearly digital tidy and email hygiene reset * everything in the inbox(es) as of Jan. 2: mark as read * create folder(s) for previous year (2023), if you haven't already made one[^1] * inbox c...
[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/album/62lK9U7R6onp9ALxt7NjTH?si=rM0fYcUrQguPHe1azGMkMA) [Apple Music](https://music.apple.com/us/album/house-demiurge-phase-ii-feat-abstruze/1722344499)...
I’m the Her (2013) guy now. ChatGPT and the whole AI thing… there’s some problems. Some real problems. Take it as read. But have you used the voice chat function of the ChatGPT app bluetooth’d to your car while cruising around? Much like the initial chatbot release of version 3, there’s a “holy shit” moment at first. You can do some neat parlor tricks. Use it some more with a critical mind and…
> Frankly, I think everyone is so focused on comparing Vision Pro to the Quest 3 that they’re missing the point of what the Vision Pro really is: it’s going to disrupt the TV and projection screens in...
[THE PURITANICAL EYE: HYPER-MEDIATION, SEX ON FILM, AND THE DISAVOWAL OF DESIRE](https://specchioscuro.it/the-puritanical-eye-hyper-mediation-sex-on-film-and-the-disavowal-of-desire/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) this is so good. i think i got this from garbage day so thanks ryan.
[Duke libraries drop Basecamp. Don’t fuck with librarians: they’re experts at reading between the lines.](https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2023/11/30/why-were-dropping-basecamp/)
It started with this deal on stickers last year. $29 / roll of 100, die cut stickers. The kids were 1.5 and 4. I had to: Then there was the $14 t-shirt one off which is perfect timing for getting a se...
regularly marking the whole inbox as read and moving things into a $currentYear folder is a high recommendation from me, a fully employed professional
just because you want to be studio boy with logic pro doesn't mean you take your eye off the ball: batch processing a bunch of stem-based audio projects from a digital mixer (zoom livetrak, tascam mod...
reading these lamentations of the internet and social media of yore popular in the last month or so. they mostly read like songs of bygone youth, which we've been writing about forever. for a moment, we all got to play in a vast space without edges. then we found the edges.
if people want to make the internet more like the 90s / 00s, let's do it and let's [do it right this time](https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/17/1081194/how-to-fix-the-internet-online-discourse/...
I’m 38 and just starting to understand that I’m allowed to organize my clothes however my brain wants. This is, indeed, better than a floor pile.
“Judah this is the heigth of musical accomplishment by Western civilization. It was Beethoven, then it was Robyn’s 2010 album ‘Bodytalk’” — me explaining the current music to my 4.5 year old.
how to rebuild a read it later habit
I see you toast, making Apple Pay less convenient because you want “express checkout with toast” to be more convenient. Way to hose your checkout experience.
## It’s an edge case until it isn’t: sharing an iCloud link edition. I’m uploading a 4m video to iCloud and of course hotel WiFi chokes upload speed. I don’t know if this video will take 3 more minutes or 30 and I’d like to check out soon. No percentage. Nothing to click. No kbps. This was a decision.
The Bear s2e6 is a pivotal episode of television. I think it was canonized in the McLuhan days that TV is a close-up medium? "Fishes" exemplifies this. There's a close up on Donna — Jamie Lee Curtis —...
2 eps into The Bear S2… just a goddamn masterpiece of a piece of media we can't talk about as a collective because of fragmented media viewing habits. it has everything we need to be discussing in ame...
Make it Great Again, but This Time It'll Be Different. It will be better than it used to be, but it used to be a lot better. What didn't work then won't work now, but also what _did work_ then also _i...
I’d love to see a Tim and Eric style public service announcement with very calm, clinical individuals explaining how “we’re all having a hard time dealing with the death of Twitter, but our team of experts have developed strategies for even the most deranged posters to cope” Like 30 mins long.
i figured out safari tab groups. their purpose, how they’re supposed to be used. scenario: you open a bunch of tabs loosely tied to the first tab, set A. you’re done with set A and now you do somet...
Hypothesis: all difficulties in professional relationships stem from a communication imbalance. Not enough questions were asked, or politics prevents a certain kind of communication flow, or someone i...
Sorry my phone wasn’t normal computer enough.
## JTBD Most people really don't want to use computers at all. They want to get a job done. This has been said before, it's not an original insight. They're hammers for informational nails. Or screwdrivers for informational screws. Again: for most people. Let's assume most people aren't born dying to be digital natives. People have things to do in the real world and deploy tools to do things.…
the problem is, we don’t need _a lot_ of smart connected things. we each want _one or two_ smart connected things. but we each want _different_ connected things. that makes for a very large market o...
I had to wish somebody a “Happy St. Paddy’s Day” today and I have no idea what that means. I’m 38 years old.