Don't confuse work ethic with work volume

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. ...

April 13, 2026 · 1 min · Nick Schmidt (oneguynick)

Reporting for Duty: From 90s Light Infantry to Modern Bitpacking

Standard serialisation protocols have gone AWOL. If you want to get the packet home with only 50 bytes of airtime, you need to enlist bitpacking.

March 27, 2026 · 3 min · Nick Schmidt (oneguynick)