Another SWE with a few thoughts about tech and more.
I maintain a very large open-source static site built with Jekyll, locally this takes nearly ~2m to build. Not really an issue in a CI deployment but when developing locally, even with incremental builds, it was painful enough to send me in search of alternatives. Which is where I came across Rustkyll - a port of Jekyll, written entirely by AI agents. I think the disparaging term for this is "slop…
Picture a future where we've forgotten how our own machines work. The systems still run (sometimes), but no one alive understands them anymore. So we stop engineering and start praying, muttering incantations at servers, taping blessings to motherboards, swinging incense around data centres in the hope that the spirits inside will keep the lights on. It sounds absurd, but it's also a logical…
You're absolutely right! In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, the way we create and consume content is undergoing a seismic shift — one that represents a pivotal moment in the broader conversation around authenticity. It's not just redefining what it means to write: it's fundamentally reshaping the very fabric of creative expression as we know it. I'm so sorry you had to read that, but…
Departing from my usual subject matter of technology, I wanted to take an opportunity to tackle a question at the heart of a hobby that I care deeply about: board gaming. For those who stumble here from my usual engineering focused ramblings - I won't be giving a lot of preamble but currently there are over 150k games on BGG , which gives some sense as to how big the hobby of tabletop gaming now…
It would seem at this point that I'm almost compelled to talk about AI at the expense of nearly any other topic, given it dominates the current landscape of discussion. So here we are. I've been a fairly balanced advocate for AI development on this blog, but recent developments with ClawdBot — turned MoltBot, now turned OpenClaw - I think are the beginnings of an alarming trend of poorly…
MCP servers are everywhere now. GitHub , Atlassian , even BoardGameGeek have them. Plenty are badly built though. They're thin API wrappers that fire back a wall of data without sparing a thought for the context window they're filling. Everyone is rushing to ship one. Companies feel they need an MCP server, so they bolt one on regardless of whether it's any good. Some just expose their entire REST…
Dr. Ian Malcolm famously said, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Lift that line out of a film about rampaging dinosaurs and it lands uncomfortably well on how we're deploying AI right now. The fact you can automate something doesn't mean you should. I'm broadly optimistic about AI, but the good stuff comes from a…
Engineers tend to judge software purely on technical merit. Fair enough - it matters enormously. It doesn't happen in a vacuum though. Every technical decision is made inside an economic reality, and getting that reality right is often what lets the technical excellence happen at all. Some of this is already baked into us. We've all heard "don't reinvent the wheel". On the surface it's obvious…
We're increasingly seeing AI applied to all sorts of interesting areas. Today I can share something truly groundbreaking... ordering a succulent Chinese meal. This is AI manifest. The system uses Twilio for telephony, ElevenLabs for the AI voice agent, Firecrawl for data extraction, and MCP Go for integration. Together, these services automate the phone ordering process. Find the code on GitHub…
MIT researchers recently discovered that ChatGPT users showed dramatically reduced brain activity compared to unassisted writers, which of course was the news outlets opportunity to pounce on the narrative, "AI is making us dumber" . Yet this interpretation misunderstands what the data actually reveals about intelligence and adaptation. The experiment's context matters. Short, twenty minute,…