Will we build a new web in the ashes of the old one? Or maybe we already are?

And I feel for them. The wonderful satisfaction of a small, elegant solution to a thorny problem is a, I think, a big motivator for many software people. There are still fun problems to solve, I think, but those little koans are ~gone (in many jobs). Until the tokens run out for good, at least.

I certainly have my own feelings about the LLMificarion of software engineering, but as someone ~25 year into their career, I’m not sure how much those matter. I work with a bunch of relatively junior engineers folks in the first five years of their career. Their reaction to all this- and especially young women- is sadness. “This job, babysitting the bots, isn’t what I wanted to do.”

tRump just gifted 1.4 MILLION acres of OUR protected public land in Alaska to the state for mining & drilling.

50 years of protections erased in 75 days. No vote. No tribal input.

Wildlife corridor is gone. Park & three refuges are now ecological islands

Corporate greed wins again.
https://mcsp.short.gy/kmUe

A retiree delivering DoorDash to the White House to pay for their spouses cancer would be a national embarrassment in a sane world instead of an opportunity to celebrate “no taxes on tips”

Imagine how shit Vance has got to feel rn. Sent around the world to do a bunch of loser garbage, staying up all night getting pwnt in Islamabad, failing and failing repeatedly, knowing you’re being actively humiliated by your boss you absolutely despise, watching the bus get closer and closer. Not even able to grift like Kushner and Witkoff.

Haha fuck that dude.

Regex of the week:

/\b(wtf|wth|ffs|omfg|shit(ty|tiest)?|dumbass|horrible|awful|
piss(ed|ing)? off|piece of (shit|crap|junk)|what the (fuck|hell)|
fucking? (broken|useless|terrible|awful|horrible)|fuck you|
screw (this|you)|so frustrating|this sucks|damn it)\b/

#claudecodeleak

My goodness linkedin is a weird place.

A better world is possible.

Rejected takeoff

My early take on the LLM coding wave, maybe a year ago, was that it would be the death knell of language development. It may well be still (for all kinds of direct and indirect reasons).

However! What’s a good way to keep the slop machines from going off the rails in your complex project? Give them a little DSL with targeted, constrained capabilities. And what does an admirable job at building those? Yes, the slop machines (with engaged human guidance).

Let a thousand little
languages bloom.

Translation for lay(ish) people

“Move fast” : management decisions are absolute P0 and based on some billionaire’s last tweet. Everything else goes in the backlog. Especially error reports.

“Act like an owner” : be ready to take the fall when the whole thing falls apart (but actually fixing stuff is for a mythical backlog sprint)

“Thrive in ambiguity” : everything is P0. You get to figure out which are important. Hint: probably not the fixes.

This guy’s story is not going to end well. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/style/clavicular-looksmaxxing-braden-peters.html?unlocked_article_code=1.M1A.aIkj.b0j73kUe3iq3&smid=nytcore-ios-share

I’m proud of the SFUSD teachers for having the bravery to strike and for winning major concessions in a deal this morning. It was great to see the energy and solidarity across the city as teachers, students, parents, and supporters picketed and marched.

From management's perspective, all us software people do all day is fix bugs and prop up rickety services, so why should they care if we're fixing bugs that were 100x cheaper to produce?

An idle and I'm sure unoriginal thought on AI codegen: most (human-generated, in-industry) code already sucks. The selection bias on fedi means people _here_ are intentional and careful and horrified by the slop. And folks who've spent their careers at marquee tech firms may have a similar perspective. But tech is big and most tech is broken most of the time. I'm not sure the bots are going to change the amount of broken code meaningfully. (This is not at all an endorsement, to be clear)

I’m not much of a New Yorker but my experience and impression of Penn Station is that it’s a loathsome, subterranean warren, unnavigable and smelling of cheap pizza. He wants his name on that? Honestly seems fine.

Helicoper N2314 as ENRGY14 sniffing over California and Arguello streets in San Francisco.

wew! department of energy nuke security helicopter doing a low altitude survey over SF. big and loud!

The clouds and moon above Hopland