Graybeard builds software; you get the lessons for free. Helping vibe coders 💪 @ Fortivibe Building stable, durable software @ Lattice Engineering Streami...
Growing up attending public school, math was without a doubt my worst subject. And that's always bothered me. Especially as a programmer. I can build incredibly complex systems (that do math themselves), but on paper, I struggle with basic concepts. This has limited—to some degree—what type of programming tasks I can actually accomplish, and so, I've decided to shit or get off the pot. Instead of…
This has been on my mind the past few weeks. We’re speed walking into an era where using AI has turned into an excused for a witch hunt, but I’ve noticed it getting worse lately. A blog post, a tweet, an illustration, an entire product. The what doesn’t really matter. The response is nonetheless automatic: “AI slop!” “ok thx ChatGPT” Someone spots an em dash, a sentence that feels a little too…
Someone called one of my Reddit comments “AI slop” the other day. Another developer defended me, checked out a few of my videos, and sent me this: Me and you do this cause we love this shit. It knocked me loose. I've been pretty depressed in response to all of the AI stuff lately. It's no secret that I've adapted my workflow to rely on it, but I'm also not interested in the "if it's not an ATM,…
Just spent the afternoon test driving Kimi K3. I see what all the fuss is about around distillation. Lately, I've been relying primarily on Anthropic's Opus 4.7/4.8 models for most of my work. It's been getting expensive and I wanted to check out the hype around Kimi to see if it's good enough as a daily driver. Well, yeah. I'll be damned...it is. There's a noticeable difference in speed, but…
This has been on my mind a lot lately: whether or not a given piece of software needs a UI. It's a presumed default nowadays, but I'm finding a lot of situations where I'm saying "I don't need a UI for that." Today, I was wiring up the last few pieces of the blog for Fortivibe . My default instinct was to build an admin UI (I let Claude slap together a bivouac for testing last week), but then I…
Quick note post. I wanted to document this handy little Unix command for spitting out the absolute path of a file: cd ~/projects/<project>/docs ls thing.md realpath thing.md /path/to/home/projects/<project>/docs/thing.md So, if thing.md lives at ~/projects/ /docs/thing.md, we'd get something like... /path/to/home/projects/<project>/docs/thing.md Especially when dealing with LLMs (needing to…
It's taken me a few years to understand this, but not every change an LLM makes deserves the same level of scrutiny. What got me thinking about this was this tweet by antirez (creator of Redis): It caught my attention because while I disagree with what he says at a generalized, blanket level, I agree from a more granular, "in the trenches" perspective. If the work an LLM is helping you with is…
For about the past month or so, I've been working on Fortivibe . It's a simple idea: if you're a vibe coder with no technical experience, it can be scary to go into production. You know your app works on screen, but behind the scenes, it's a total guess as to what is and isn't secure, stable, and ready for real users. That's where Fortivibe comes in. Using a combination of static analysis and…
Sorry to any physicists; this isn't for you. This is a small idea that I came up with while teaching developers about a decade ago. When you're designing a piece of software, I've found that it helps to imagine a piece of string in your head. That string connects to other pins or nodes. For example, if we work backwards from the end state... Our UI renders. We fetch our data and pass it to our UI.…
You better get used to vibe coding. Not because it’s good. Not because it’s safe. Not because the people doing it have any sense of what they’re doing. But because... it’s here . People have seen the trick now. Describe an idea, press enter a few times, and get something on the screen. Maybe the code is a mess. Maybe it's insecure. Maybe the database schema looks like it was designed by someone…