Read the Tea Leaves | Software and other dark arts, by Nolan Lawson

My first blog post was published just under 15 years ago in March of 2011. Since then, I’ve published 151 posts, including this one. (If I was a numerologist, I’d think it had something to do with Pokémon.)
This blog has covered a wide variety of topics, including Pokémon in fact (I wrote the first Pokédex app for Android). The topics largely followed the trajectory of my career: starting with machine learning, veering into Android, taking a detour into...

TL;DR: With one prompt, I built an implementation of IndexedDB using Claude Code and a Ralph loop, passing 95% of a targeted subset of the Web Platform Tests, and 77.4% of a more rigorous subset of tests.
When I learned that two simple browser engines had been vibe-coded, I was not particularly surprised. A browser engine is a well-understood problem with multiple independent implementations, whose codebases have no doubt been slurped up into LLM training...

“Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” – ClickHole
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes, paraphrased
2025 was a weird year for me. If you had asked me exactly a year ago, I would have said I thought LLMs were amusing toys but inappropriate for real software development. I couldn’t fathom why people would want a hyperactive five-year-old to grab their...

My reading appetite has been weak again this year, which I blame on two things: 1) Slay the Spire being way too good of a video game, and 2) starting a new job, and thus having more of my mental energy focused on that.
But I did manage to read some stuff! So without further ado, here are the book reviews:...