Opinion

I think AI is ushering us into the 3D printing era of software. I’m sure others have had this thought too, but it really hit me this morning during a conversation with a colleague. When 3D printers became affordable, people predicted the end of manufacturing. Everyone would print everything at home. Why buy a product when you can just make it? But that’s not what happened. Far from it. Most people still don’t own a 3D printer. Of the people who do own one, they mostly print models someone else designed. Only a small group actually opens up CAD and designs their own parts. And nobody’s printing their own fridge. ...

Most of my life I used Windows for gaming, and Linux for development. When I started my first full time job in 2007, they gave me a Windows desktop for Java dev, and I hated it… In 2010 they added a BYOC policy and two devs I worked with convinced me to buy my first ever Mac, and since then, that’s what I’ve been using. Mainly because I dialed in my perfect setup early, and migrating an old Mac to a new Mac is super easy, and once I got my iPad and eventually settled on iPhone (after jumping between that and Android every 2 years for a while), I was locked into the ecosystem, and no matter how much it gets enshittified, I just haven’t been able to migrate away (and I’ve tried, quite a few times). ...

I was on LinkedIn this morning making a quick post about my experience with Omarchy, and then this showed up in my feed. “Local dev setup makes zero sense to me now.” It’s a comment from Matt Pocock, who we all know by now, the TypeScript educator, creator of the /grill-me skill that half the industry has been grilled by at this point (including myself), with a clip from The Pragmatic Engineer podcast. The post goes on: every dev has a hundred terminals, those terminals should be available to your whole organisation, available from everywhere. So for him that means he’s on a train chatting to his Hetzner box in Discord, and therefore an expensive laptop feels like wasted compute. ...

Many many moons ago when I was still a teen, one of my favourite things in the world was having a LAN party with my friends. For those generations reading this who grew up in the always online era who might not know what a LAN is, since it might be hard for you to imagine a time where you couldn’t just hop on Discord or Teams or whatever and talk to your friends and play online together, but back then, bringing your computers and consoles together and hooking then up to a local network was the way to go. ...

I’ve never been a fan of digital only, or subscription services. I’ve mentioned this before in some of my posts. I feel like the shift in the industry towards these things closely align with the decline in quality of the related media. For example, as someone who builds and creates software for a living, and takes pride in the workmanship of the things I create, the idea of “day one patches” to is so stupid. It incentives not testing and building properly because you can easily “fix it in post”. ...

I have not been “AI pilled” yet. (Also, what a stupid term.) While AI has become deeply integrated into my workflow, and I genuinely love having agents run things for me in the background while I focus on other things, I wouldn’t say I’ve had some red pill moment where “I see the truth now” and AI became an essential and daily thing… You see, my morning routine when I start work is the same: I open my terminal of choice (Warp), and I open my IDE of choice (whichever JetBrains one is applicable). And then if the task deems it, I’ll open Junie or Claude inside my IDE. ...

Do trust and accountability go hand in hand? This is something I’ve been chewing on over the weekend. And I don’t know really, but here’s where I’m coming from. One of my side projects at PiForge at the moment is building a system around Agentic Engineering using team lead principles I’ve honed over years, and applying how human teams communicate and organize over the SDLC to agents (i.e. start with a spec, write tickets on a kanban board, grab the next highest priority, work till done, test, PR, release, document). ...

Trigger warning: this is part rant, part genuine exploration, and entirely my opinion. As usual. Also; research heavy. I wanted this to be informed. I’ve been thinking about this one for a while. In a previous post I argued that not everyone who writes code is an engineer, and that the title carries expectations. In another I complained about the lack of standards in an industry that rewards speed and hype over depth. And more recently I got on my soapbox about fundamentals mattering — about how the people who actually understood the machines they worked on are slowly dying off, and what we’re being left with instead. ...

Just because your fancy new Claude Code plugin prints out “50% tokens saved” in the logs doesn’t mean you actually got them. I was playing around with Caveman Compression last week and tried to get the UserPromptSubmit hook to rewrite prompts using the tool for savings across the board. Turns out? The hook doesn’t allow it. Probably for security reasons; can you imagine the injection attacks if any random plugin could hook into and replace your prompts? ...

I finished Masters of Doom a few weeks ago and I’m nearly done with Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Both books hit harder than they should, given I already knew most of the stories. But reading them back-to-back crystallized something that’s been nagging at me for months. There’s a line in Hackers about the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club in the 1960s: “Access to computers should be unlimited and total. All information should be free.” ...