Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
You Might Want to Try Being Less Creative
After a jam session at Secret Studios with a musician friend, Bryant reflects on why he never finished a song as a teenager, arguing that trying to be original at every step keeps you from finishing anything and that borrowing proven structures frees you to create.
3 min · 732 words
On using AI as a writing assistant
Nina I. Shamsi, who calls herself a bad writer because her explanations wander, describes how she uses AI as a writing assistant: breaking writing into stages such as brief, outline, drafting and review, the components through which AI helps organise each stage, and the versioned artifacts produced, while admitting the process is still unfinished.
8 min · 1,809 words
Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging
Michael Lynch catalogues the most common mistakes he sees from beginner software bloggers: meandering intros, assuming the reader knows everything except one thing, overreliance on links, presenting posts as sequels, excessive formality, and basic rendering problems like mobile overflow and unreadable fonts, with a checklist summary.
8 min · 1,921 words
21 reasons I didn't become an EMT, rankedActual reasons Ben Stolovitz delayed getting an EMT license, sorted by ridiculousness.
Software engineer Ben Stolovitz ranks twenty-one real reasons he delayed becoming an Emergency Medical Technician—from spare time and money to social awkwardness and fear—before finally taking a NOLS Wilderness EMT course in 2024.
10 min · 2,395 words
“Just Ask Claude” Is A Rare And Valuable Skill
Justis Mills on why, when someone asks you for help and you simply ask an AI, they usually couldn't have done it themselves: they avoid AI, don't pay for premium models, are behind the times, lack the latent knowledge you bring to the prompt, or simply want to connect with you.
2 min · 563 words
Of Mottes, Baileys, and Stochastic Parrots
Manoel Ribeiro argues the "stochastic parrots" metaphor often motte-and-baileys: it dismisses LLM capabilities, then retreats to the trivial claim that models predict the next token.
6 min · 1,470 words
I can't tell who's teaching who anymore
I finished writing an article recently. I did what I always do before I queue something to be published: read it aloud, as if reading a storybook to a child. It's how I find the rhythm: where a comma should sit, whether an em dash earns its beat, and which parenthesis a reader can skip without missing much.
9 min · 2,022 words
Being asked to sanitise Wikipedia entries
Longtime Wikipedia editor Ruben Schade describes getting paid and unpaid requests to scrub contentious material from articles—and draws a hard line against editing for hire or removing valid citations.
1 min · 224 words
An open letter to software makers: ship fewer dark patterns, respect user agency, and remember that people live with your products every day—not just engage with them.
3 min · 590 words
on AI, desire, and fictional charactersdoes sherlock holmes have goals?
Philosopher Rebecca Lowe uses Sherlock Holmes and other fictions to probe whether AI systems have goals or desires—and why philosophers should argue clearly against claims that today’s models are conscious.
10 min · 2,207 words
Angel Espinoza borrows Jeffrey Katzenberg’s “it’s not the how, it’s the why” line from Hollywood and applies it to civil engineering work with coding agents—agents change the how, not the purpose.
2 min · 388 words
You Are No Longer Invited to DinnerThe death of the American host
Derek Thompson traces a half-century collapse in Americans hosting friends at home—from 42% monthly in 1975 to 12% in 2026—and weighs harried dual-earner households, screens, and other explanations for the great disinvitation.
10 min · 2,257 words
When I was a freshman at RISD, there was a club fair, and I was drawn to the RISD STEAM table, where I met Carly Ayres and Sayer Pease. They welcomed me with open arms, and I started to learn about things like 3D printers and Arduino. I first learned Processing from Clement Valla, paper electronics from Jie Qi, and then Arduino from Paul Badger. I fell in love, and the fate was more or less sealed when I made my first music synthesizer. Creating a tool that output things I never thought of while making it lit up my heart, and is still why I do the things I do today.…
5 min · 1,063 words
“They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.”
Marcin Wichary reflects on software craft and quality through the lens of duty of care to users—drawing on design and tooling history to ask what it means when products treat people as afterthoughts.
3 min · 664 words
September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
Tom Wojcik ties the Hormuz closure, energy and food prices, bond-market repricing, NATO uncertainty, climate stress, AI-era job ladders, and Poland’s demographics into one essay on buffers swapped for dependencies.
29 min · 6,592 words
Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
In 2011, Apple released the Cards app. The app — which required iOS 5 — let you design custom letterpress cards, with your messages and photos printed upon them — which Apple would ship to your recipient on your behalf. I recently learned the origin story of Cards, and that it was specifically a Steve Jobs product. It also wasn’t smooth sailing. But first, some backstory, and inserting myself into the narrative, because it’s my site and I can do what I want here.
6 min · 1,445 words
Ten Lines Of Code That Changed My World
Roel Nieskens picks ten short snippets—from BASIC hello-world loops to JavaScript wat Batman and typography hacks—that shaped how he thinks about programming, fronts-ends, and fonts.
3 min · 689 words
Marcos Magueta borrows a Roman naming practice to argue for clearer software names—how ancient cognomina habits map onto naming libraries, products, and the stories we tell about code.
5 min · 1,232 words
If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?
If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become? Yesterday, I received this email as a response to [You Can't Vibe Code Love](https://blog.codinghorror.com/you cant vibe code love/). It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well.
3 min · 679 words
Your Body Of Work Thinks Back At You
A photographer revisits years of bench photos and finds hostile architecture emerging in the archive—arguing that a body of work can reveal patterns the maker only notices in retrospect.
3 min · 600 words