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

I didn’t ask for this and neither did you.
I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it.
I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production....

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...