AI

The Digital Archaeological Dig I recently assisted a friend with a codebase that felt like a digital archaeological dig—a chaotic mixture of Python versions and conflicting modules. The modern instinct was to upload the lot to an LLM to “fix” everything. The result was absolute carnage. No version control or history meant “editing on master” in real-time. More time spent reversing AI “improvements” than fixing the original bug. A stark reminder: tools are getting smarter, but engineering discipline is becoming a rare commodity. The Return of the Artisanal Mess This mirrors the “artisanal” FrontPage websites of the late 90s. A lower barrier to entry does not guarantee higher quality output. ...

Don’t confuse “work ethic” with “work volume.” Bryan Cantrill’s latest post is a precision strike on the “37k lines of code a day” crowd. In engineering, “virtuous laziness” is about spending hours in a hammock to find the one abstraction that saves weeks of toil. It’s about minimising cognitive load because human time is finite. LLMs have no such constraints. They don’t feel the “cost” of complexity, so they’ll happily bake you a 37,000-line layer cake of garbage just because it’s “free” to generate. ...

The breakthrough came when I stopped treating the wearable as a “coach” and started treating it as a sensor. Strategic Summary The Risk: Blindly following “black box” AI health advice. The Solution: Custom data wrangling and multi-year trend analysis. Status: Mission success confirmed by raw data, not app badges. I’ve been a health data geek since the Nike+ shoe sensor era. What started as curiosity evolved into a full-scale surveillance mission on my own biology. By leveraging AI to parse a decade of movement and heart rate trends, I’ve extracted actionable intelligence that not a single health professional has ever asked to see. It’s a strange tactical oversight: we have the telemetry, but it remains siloed from the people managing our care. ...

Whether it’s the cadence of a score, the logic of a codebase, or the spoken word, language is the ultimate “human” terrain. I’ve been fortunate to work across the globe. Outside of local food and drink, language remains the primary metric for how a culture operates. It is their conceptual framework and their historical documentation. I initially feared AI would sanitise this beauty. I thought effortless translation would lead to a “lossy” compression of culture, flattening the landscape. Instead, I’m seeing the opposite. ...

I am a sucker for good design and character. In a world of mass produced replicas, there is something genuine about the feel of an error. It is that slight non perfection that proves a human hand was at work. For the majority of my kit, I want the perfect version, but the definition of perfection is shifting. Coding with AI currently occupies a curious mental space. I recognise the future and I accept the new methodology is upon us. Yet, I wonder if we are headed toward a world of Artisanal Code or Boutique Hand Written software, much like the resurgence of vinyl or analogue horology. ...