Software and other dark arts, by Nolan Lawson
There s a bizarre aspect of AI coding that I ve been trying to put my finger on, and I think it s this: you can basically just decide how many bugs you want your software to have now. We discovered this first with security, because of course security bugs are the most non-negotiable ones. But I think [ ]
A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible. Spew out barely-passable slop, open massive PRs, and merge them unvetted. Ship it! But the thing is, LLMs are very flexible. And you can use them just as effectively to write high-quality code more [ ]
Programming is an art. It s less like fine art or music and closer to architecture or carpentry – combining form and function – but it is an art. If you don t believe me, consider code reviews. I ve definitely done code reviews where I admired the mastery on display, where the elegance of the solution shone [ ]
You had a story you used to tell yourself about how you got here in life. You d share the story with others. Maybe you d be at a party, and someone would ask what you do, and you d say, I m a programmer. And their eyes would perk up and their mind would fill with images of [ ]
Oprah Winfrey and I have something in common, which is that our favorite album is Paul Simon s Graceland. I ve been thinking a lot recently about the opening track, The Boy in the Bubble . The song can be read a few different ways, but I read it as an aging man amazed by modernity but also [ ]
I didn t ask for this and neither did you. I didn t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it. I didn t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that [ ]
My first blog post was published just under 15 years ago in March of 2011. Since then, I ve published 151 posts, including this one. (If I was a numerologist, I d think it had something to do with Pokémon.) This blog has covered a wide variety of topics, including Pokémon in fact (I wrote the first [ ]
TL;DR: With one prompt, I built an implementation of IndexedDB using Claude Code and a Ralph loop, passing 95% of a targeted subset of the Web Platform Tests, and 77.4% of a more rigorous subset of tests. When I learned that two simple browser engines had been vibe-coded, I was not particularly surprised. A browser [ ]
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point – ClickHole When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? – John Maynard Keynes, paraphrased 2025 was a weird year for me. If you had asked me exactly a year ago, I would have said I thought LLMs were [ ]
My reading appetite has been weak again this year, which I blame on two things: 1) Slay the Spire being way too good of a video game, and 2) starting a new job, and thus having more of my mental energy focused on that. But I did manage to read some stuff! So without further [ ]