#coding

Multiple ways to run common coding tasks in a convenient and consistent way across multiple repositories. This is not exactly rocket science. It’s a small quality of life improvement for you and your team. It’s super simple to set up and yet it’s something I rarely see in the wild. This could be one small thing you can implement while you’re having your first coffee tomorrow morning to do your good deed for the day.

Every year I dread coming back from vacation not because of the work, but because I have no idea where I left off. A failing test, a well-written TODO, and a slow first day back are all you need to ease back in.

If adopting coding agents demonstrably reduces the quality of the code and features you are producing, you should address that problem directly: figure out which aspects of your process are hurting the quality of your output and fix them.

Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow.

It’s also not the typing of code that I really enjoy, nor is it the syntax or structure or boilerplate that’s required to build anything. It’s the fact you get to build something out of nothing, writing code was just how you got there. And with today’s tooling, that saves a ton of time. AI really has made web development fun again.

Coding agents replace the part of my job that involves typing the code into a computer. I find what’s left to be a much more valuable use of my time.

And a vibe coding tool absolutely won’t make something truly new. The most radical, disruptive, interesting, surprising, weird, fun innovations in technology have happened because people with a strange compulsion to do something cool had enough knowledge to get their code out into the world. The World Wide Web itself was not a huge technological leap over what came before — it took off because of a huge leap in insight into human nature and human behavior, that happened to be captured in code. The actual bits and bytes? They were mostly just plain text, much of which was in formats that had already been around for many years prior to Tim Berners-Lee assembling it all into the first web browser. That kind of surprising innovation could probably never be vibe coded, even though all of the raw materials might be scooped up by an LLM, because even if the human writing the prompt had that counterintuitive stroke of genius, the system would still be hemmed in by the constraints of the works it had been trained on. The past is a prison when you’re inventing the future.

In recent years, there has been something of a “winter” in DSL design and development due to the high maintenance costs and the tooling expectations from end users. This blog post explored the syntactic dimension of “token-efficiency” in DSL design: I invite you to explore more of this space, including semantics; I, for one, will welcome more crazy DSL implementations!

Tutorials, which are learning-oriented, practical steps. How-to guides, which are task-oriented, practical steps. Technical references, which capture information-oriented, theoretical knowledge. Explanations (or discussions), which capture understanding-oriented, theoretical knowledge.

New tools always make it easier to code with a shallower understanding of the system. Claude Code, Cursor and their ilk are bringing programming closer to natural language just like C and Java and Python once did. This is a good thing! It’ll lead to the continued democratization of programming and ever more people in conversation with computers. But I don’t think this changes the fundamental reality that the best programmers aren’t the ones that make the widest use of the highest abstractions. That’ll continue to be those who dig down and understand what’s happening at a deeper level — that understanding will always lead to more deft use of any tools that programmers have at their disposal.

Can you ship AI-generated code without creating a maintenance nightmare six months from now? Can you debug it when it breaks? Can you modify it when requirements change? Can you onboard new engineers to a codebase they didn't write and the AI barely explained? Most teams haven't realized this shift yet. They're optimizing for code generation speed while comprehension debt silently accumulates in their repos.

I’ve been noticing a new pattern: people with deep domain knowledge but no coding experience are now building their own tools. Armed with AI assistants, they can create custom workflows in a matter of days, bypassing traditional development cycles. Are these solutions production-ready? Not even close. But they solve urgent, specific problems, and that’s what matters. Tasks that once required weeks of specialized training are quickly becoming weekend projects.

A key part of having a reviewable PR is writing commits that tell a story. Present your changes incrementally and logically so reviewers can follow your thought process. Generic commit messages such as "add dependency," "implement file upload feature," and "address PR feedback" don’t tell much of a story and leave reviewers guessing. Why was the dependency added? What were the specific steps in creating the file uploader feature? What feedback is being addressed?

The commit is our principle unit of work. It deserves to be treated thoughtfully and with care.

tl:dr; Brainstorm spec, then plan a plan, then execute using LLM codegen. Discrete loops. Then magic. ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

But lets talk about the expense too, because I think there’s something bad there as well: coding agents, and especially Claude 3.7 (the backend of Claude Code), tend to write too much code, a phenomenon that ends up costing users more than it should.

Perhaps what we need is a new understanding of where happiness can exist in this AI-augmented world. Maybe the joy doesn’t have to disappear completely — it just shifts. Instead of finding delight in writing the perfect algorithm, perhaps we’ll discover satisfaction in the higher-level thinking about system design, in the creative process of describing exactly what we want to build, or in the human aspects of software development that AI can’t touch.

A field guide to responsible AI-assisted development

This is a live-coding tool, where you can write a 2D fragment/pixel shader while it is running in the background. It's a fork of Bonzomatic that add network communication (WebSocket Server). The goal is to send a shader as text across a network and receive it somewhere else for display. The shader is send when you ask for compilation (ctrl+r) and also at regular updates (interval can be set in config.json) Bonzomatic can be launched as "sender" or as "grabber" if you want to send your shader or visualize a distant shader.

One consistent pattern I’ve observed in the past year, since I published "The death of the junior developer", is that junior developers have actually been far more eager to adopt AI than senior devs. It’s not always true; a few folks have told us that their juniors are scared to use it because they think, somewhat irrationally, that it will take their jobs. (See: Behavioral regret theory. Thanks for the pointer Dr. Daniel Rock!)

Welcome to OpenHands (formerly OpenDevin), a platform for software development agents powered by AI. OpenHands agents can do anything a human developer can: modify code, run commands, browse the web, call APIs, and yes—even copy code snippets from StackOverflow.

Use llamafile to generate inline code completions in react / next.js apps.

Create and share beautiful images of your source code. Start typing, or drop a file into the text area to get started.

Create and share beautiful images of your source code. Start typing, or drop a file into the text area to get started.

Nifty music making with JavaScript and web audio

Nifty music making with JavaScript and web audio

That's an... interesting perspective: "Kanban is a paternalistic project management theory that aims to set developers on the right path. It promotes the idea that the manager is the arbiter of success and the deliverer of change. And like its forbear Scrum, its major proponents are those who don’t code for a living."

That's an... interesting perspective: "Kanban is a paternalistic project management theory that aims to set developers on the right path. It promotes the idea that the manager is the arbiter of success and the deliverer of change. And like its forbear Scrum, its major proponents are those who don’t code for a living."

"Old farts" are often excluded from that culture, not because we're lousy coders but because we won't put up with that shit. We have lives, we have families, we have other things that are important to us. We're not about to sleep at our desks and trade watching our kids grow up for the promise of striking it rich. Especially when the people who really strike it rich aren't the ones writing code.

Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter catching your its and it’s issues or reminding you of the rules regarding that or which. Here’s the rub: there is a compiler and it’s fucking brutal. It’s your readers. Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back - failure is a lonely silence. Python is looking pretty sweet now, right?

But Judge Alsup wasn’t convinced. He told the court he had learned to code in Java for the trial — implying that he knew other languages as well — and he said that he had written some of the infringing code at least a hundred times since Oracle filed its suit in August 2010. “I can do it. You can do it. It’s so simple,” he said, adding that it takes less than five minutes. Then looked directly at Boies. “You’re one of the best lawyers in America — how can you make that argument?” he demanded.

But Judge Alsup wasn’t convinced. He told the court he had learned to code in Java for the trial — implying that he knew other languages as well — and he said that he had written some of the infringing code at least a hundred times since Oracle filed its suit in August 2010. “I can do it. You can do it. It’s so simple,” he said, adding that it takes less than five minutes. Then looked directly at Boies. “You’re one of the best lawyers in America — how can you make that argument?” he demanded.

The last couple of days, there's been a fair amount of blogosphere angst over Coding Horror's "Please Don't Learn to Code." Ironically, the best argument for learning to code appeared this morning, when it turned out that Judge William Alsup in the Google case could program, and learned Java in the course of the trial, and wasn't going for Oracle's claim that a short range-checking function was days of work. Alsup recognized immediately (and says he wrote the function hundreds of times during the course of the trial) that it's just a few minutes work for a competent programmer.

I think it is a sign that as developers we are either terribly bored or we are out of ideas when we start to go down to bickering about violating accepted ways of development. We should concentrate on building amazing tools and experiences for users out there rather than smugly trying to undo conventions we’ve been following for years now. The web standards movement was not about enforcing arbitrary code syntax on poor developers who now have to type a few keys more. It is about making code predictable, extensible and easy to explain to newcomers. Confusing these matters doesn’t help the cause of making a new generation of developers embrace the web as a platform. Don’t be that guy.

I think it is a sign that as developers we are either terribly bored or we are out of ideas when we start to go down to bickering about violating accepted ways of development. We should concentrate on building amazing tools and experiences for users out there rather than smugly trying to undo conventions we’ve been following for years now. The web standards movement was not about enforcing arbitrary code syntax on poor developers who now have to type a few keys more. It is about making code predictable, extensible and easy to explain to newcomers. Confusing these matters doesn’t help the cause of making a new generation of developers embrace the web as a platform. Don’t be that guy.

Maybe even more interesting than the change in dates is the fact that Tran also hinted at a new application process for I/O. The last event famously sold out in less than an hour. This time around, it looks like developers will have to compete for spots at I/O. Tran tells potential attendees to use the two extra months to “brush up on [their] coding skills,” as this will “come in handy when the new application process opens in February.”

"JUST suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin's explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth."

It's the HTML 5 outline algorithm in JavaScript. "javascript:(function(s){ s.src = 'http://amachang.sakura.ne.jp/misc/outline/check.js'; document.body.appendChild(s) })(document.createElement('script')) "

"If your code will be seen by the world at large, one of your first tasks should be to write documentation. Document all functions as soon as you write them (before is also helpful). Provide samples on how to use code as soon as you finish a module (or earlier, if possible). Do not wait until your 5.0 release. Do not wait until your 1.0 release. Do not even wait until your 0.5 release. Do it as you write your code. The sooner, the better."