Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

That sort of quality variance is uncomfortable for me from a tooling perspective. Tooling should be highly consistent and this has a “works on my machine” vibe to it. I suppose all my discomfort goes away if I quit caring about the outputs. If I embrace the cognitive dissonance and switch to a “ZOMG the future is amazeballs” hype mode, my job becomes a lot easier. But my brain has been unsuccessful in doing that thus far. I like magic and mystery, but hope- or luck-based development has its challenges for me.

But the response to that skepticism is not to reject the category of technology, but rather to capture it and seize control over its direction, away from the Big AI companies. This shift to a new level of coding abstraction is exactly the kind of platform shift that presents that sort of opportunity. It’s potentially a chance for coders to be in control of some part of their destiny, at a time when a lot of bosses clearly want to get rid of as many coders as they can. At the very least, this is one area where the people who actually make things are ahead of the big platforms that want to cash in on it.

This post is about a found mural, a lost artist, and a conference talk. It’s the full story of Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural. Grab a beverage, sit back, relax, and thank you for joining me.

This should have all basic WebSerial functionality. This will be behind a pref dom.webserial.enabled.

We're past the point where this is an interesting dinner conversation about the future. The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your door yet. It's about to.

The one thing the longevity-vampire community has not yet learned from Dracula is operational security. Dracula operated in silence for centuries. He didn’t have a podcast. He didn’t track his erection quality on a public dashboard. He didn’t appear on Netflix. He understood that the fundamental rule of being a vampire is: don’t talk about being a vampire.

There's definitely a perception I've heard from folks who haven't spent a lot of time with the tools that the output of coding agents is always going to be a classical big ball of mud -- a horrible monstrosity with no clear architecture...just a jumbled mess of code that kind of somehow does the thing. It's not true, but that's what many folks think. So why not lean into it? I find myself engaging in software Dorodango pretty much every day.

Nobody rips out the plumbing. But the smartest homeowners upgrade their fixtures every chance they get.

The idea is simple. Growing rice tends to foster cultures that are more cooperative and interconnected, Talhelm and his colleagues explain Thursday in the journal Science. Why? Because farming rice paddies requires collaboration with your neighbors, Talhelm tells The Salt. Self-reliance is dangerous.

With this little experiment, I validated a critical threat intelligence workflow - we need to be monitoring for open-source vulnerabilities before (or if ever) a CVE is published. Threat actors are 100% already doing this in some form to quickly weaponise and exploit open-source issues. To emphasise the point: This is already happening.

The thing that surprised me most is that Claude Code doesn’t need you to be precise. You can describe what you want the way you’d explain it to a colleague, and it figures out how to make it happen.