Personal website of Laurie Voss
On July 16, Hugging Face reported they were being hacked - seriously enough that they reported it to law enforcement. Five days later, OpenAI disclosed that the hacking was being done by their own agent. What I want to know is: what happened to the law enforcement? OpenAI unleashed an agent that committed what would be a crime if a) it had been a person doing it or b) anyone at OpenAI had intended…
In early 2025 I predicted that AI will create many, many more programmers , and that new programming jobs would look different. In March I checked in and found startups substituting compute for labor at record rates , with the wave of new jobs nowhere in sight. This post is the next check-in, and I have good news and bad news. The bad news: AI has torched the market for junior programmers. The…
I've been interviewing a lot of DevRels recently (I'm still hiring !) and part of the interview process is, naturally, telling them what the job actually entails. In DevRel that's a bit more important than other positions, because DevRel is such a flexible and multi-faceted role that it means very different things depending what company you're at. So on the principle that "if you talk about…
About a year ago I made some predictions about the effect of AI on programming jobs . Block laid off 40% of its staff claiming AI made them more efficient . Is that really true or did they just over-hire? Let's look at some data and see what's really happening. In February 2026, global venture capital hit a single-month record: $189 billion flowed into startups in 28 days. Three companies got 83%…
I've been writing quite a bit about AI the last few years. First, I talked about what LLMs are in the first place : really big Markov chains that have hit a threshold where they appear to be reasoning, to a level of fidelity that it makes no sense to argue about whether they are really "thinking" or not. Computers that can reason about the data they are processing is a brand new thing, and it's…
There's been a whole lot of discussion recently about the impact of AI on the market for web developers, for programmers in general, and even more generally the entire labor market. I find myself making the same points over and over, and whenever I do that it's time to write a blog post about it, so this is that. Doom and utopia are not our only options There are two extreme takes on the impact of…
I started writing a post called "how to write AI apps" but it was over-reach so I scaled it back to this. Who am I to tell you how to write anything? But here's what I'll be applying to my own writing of AI-powered apps, specifically LLM applications. A battle I've already lost is that we shouldn't call LLMs "AI" at all; they are machine learning and not the general intelligence that is implied to…
I recently left my job at Netlify and have been looking at what's next. At Netlify I became very interested in the power of ML, AI and LLMs in particular, and that's the area I've been looking in. But there's a lot of hype and buzzwords around, so I wanted an explainer I can point people to when they ask "but what is all that stuff really?" It's intended to be short, and so it simplifies a lot on…
Nine months ago I gave a talk about how there is no such thing as the fundamentals of web development . It's a thing I have been saying for years but keep getting pushback on, and when that happens it's time to write a proper blog post about it rather than just arguing with people one at a time. What is a fundamental? If I'm going to argue that there's no such thing as the fundamentals of web…
Today I read Alex Russell's post The Market for Lemons and I found myself compelled to write a rebuttal. I am a big fan of Alex's work in general but not of this post in particular, which is very long, so allow me to attempt to summarize it: JavaScript-heavy single page apps (SPAs) are very popular The web is mobile-first and Android-dominated JavaScript-heavy apps do not perform well on mobile…