A personal blog of Kellan Elliott-McCrea. I don't really know what a "laughing meme" is. It sounded cool in 1999.
David Bessis’s “The fall of the theorem economy” is ostensibly about LLMs and the pursuit of pure math, and I found it fascinating in its own right, even while I’m not qualified to evaluate a number of his claims. Worth stopping and reading on its own. Additionally he names a couple of key trends that will be familiar to any engineering leader in this moment, and gives us two very useful terms.
update 2026-07-06: Anthropic added Playwright Chromium and an Artifact tool to their hosted environment. Feels more magical.
The question I asked myself (and the private Slack channel): is ensuring that I have a phone based approach to agentic coding while I’m on vacation healthy because I’m ensuring that I’m not on the computer, a phone is less instrusive, or extremely unhealthy, because you know (gestures broadly) the whole being on vacation thing.
claude -p is a quick hack that I find myself using more.
Timberborn is very much my kind of game. Complex, cozy, climate change, water system design, beavers. (My friend Schuyler pointed out at one point that my preferred genre of game is “management sims”, and that perhaps I was little over rotated on my day job.)
On AI and code review.
I enjoyed this essay from my friend Ed Lyons, which I think speaks well to my particular state of mind as someone who has been in this industry for 30+ years, a parent, a people leader, a builder.
I’m going to keep writing half baked things about AI, because it’s what I’m spending a noticeable number of hours thinking about these days, and because I don’t think it’s possible to be fully baked on the topic. Apologies in advance for those who find it irritating.
When I joined Etsy the team was two years into a rewrite chasing a more elegant architecture (actually two distinct incompatible elegant architectures), and hadn’t shipped a customer facing feature in that time. I like to say (and it may even be true) that stopping and pivoting the team to standardizing on PHP was critical to unlocking everything that came later at Etsy. After all, no one ever has…
I spent Thursday at King’s County Court House finding out whether I was going to be called for jury duty. I used the opportunity to reach way back in the spark file for a silly side project, a web app for browsing NYC’s street trees.