Published

Can You Still Say “I Built This” If AI Did the Coding?

2026-10-12T22:54:09Z

What a doomer take. Hard to argue with with Chris here. Im trying to stay positive a s just do my job to thr best of my ability without getting too wrapped up in negativity. Basically he repeats the claims of ai labs and how many have been eventually correct. If it continues a large portion of us are cooked, if you think your not what do you think happens when half of the population gets displaced?

Hand painted feature film

2026-10-12T22:40:36Z

writing code by hand is like painting a feature film on canvas

Open binaries

2026-10-12T22:28:38Z

binaries are open. what kind of s*** are we going to find cars, planes and trains?

Bat Cap

2026-10-12T14:38:11Z

I’m working on a set of Halloween caps, here is the bat.

bat cap

Ghost Cap

2026-10-12T14:37:07Z

I’m working on a set of Halloween caps, here is the ghost.

ghost cap

Jack-O-Lantern Cap

2026-10-12T14:35:04Z

I’m working on a set of Halloween caps, here is the jack-o-lantern.

jack-o-lantern cap

ascii.rest: animated ascii art for web pages, by @bas3line

2026-10-07T19:53:15Z

ascii.rest: animated ascii art for web pages, by @bas3line

236 animated ascii pieces for web pages, in TypeScript with no dependencies: for React, Next.js, Astro, or one HTML tag. MIT licensed.

ascii.rest · ascii.rest

such a cool collection of highly detailed animated ascii. everything from charts and graphs to bob ross scenary with more detail than any ascii ive see before, verging on the edge of a detailed pixel art.

What to do while you wait for your agent

2026-10-07T13:26:58Z

Why is this still a question? You start another one, thats how this works now. I often have 23 agents up and going, maybe 3-5 actively cooking. A bunch of them are done that im reviewing the final statement, maybe i want to make a note still, or need to review the output, or debating a follow up.

Im not saying its the most healthy, productive, or best. But its what all of the people I talk to that actually build things are doing

this question came up on syntaxfm

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jPvZubLUDNc

The Pi Updates are insane ⟡ Pull Requests are Dead ⟡ Turso Joining Supabase ⌁ Syntax Weekly ⌁

2026-10-06T12:42:13Z

prs are dead. called it 2026 Predictions .

Its sad to see all of these great open source projects die. The bigger the project, the greater the project, the bigger the flood of shit from random people with random harness, random, models

I like the idea of keeping issues open. I see a flow in the future of a claw like system for some projects that just kick on investigation right away, auto close duplicates, solved etc. When maintainer approves it just makes it. As cool as this sounds it also sounds sad and souless.

Is Your Org Ready For Agents

2026-10-03T23:18:48Z

Listening to this video and feeling inspired. It’s crazy how the Conference AI Engineer feels like such a hype bro conference ready to tell you just do more, let go, you’re cooked if you’re not on the train, gaslighting you to believe something they lack evidence for. But what it really is, is a group of talks that are done by some of the best engineers trying to make it through this transition just like the rest of us. Drawing the lines between the past and the current. How do you get comfortable with the current without letting go, without giving in to shipping slop, but shipping real good work with confidence.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Se8jHLliLXE

It turns out that good Developer Experience is also good Agent Experience

Checklist #

I’m sure I’m missing a lot here, but this is what I’m thinking off the cuff. If you dont have these you need to rethink the first job for your new agents to begin work on your codebase.

testing, linting, sast, type checking
continuous integration
continuous delivery
local development
Monitoring with logs, spans, and traces
flexible infrastructure

Testing #

do new changes cause regressions to working features

Can you, to the best of your ability, say what you are about to ship is of high quality and provides new features with fewer bugs? Can you prove that your code compiles? Can you prove that your code is not going to shit the bed given a valid input type from the user?

CI #

Everything done in testing, done automatically and blocking merge into the main branch.

CD #

Once you have passed all of your tests and made the merge, do you have a system to build good reliable repeatable artifacts. Does it include the smallest possible surface area for attack, thinking heavily about supply chain attacks at this point in time.

OTEL #

Monitoring with logs, spans, and traces

Can you see bugs in production, who is affected by them, and make good decisions about how to fix them, what to fix, and whether to roll back or fix forward?

Flexible Infrastructure #

Can you roll back quickly?

Can you roll out a new release quickly?

bloatware is dying

2026-10-03T15:40:39Z

Yesterday my daughter and I were waiting for her practice to start and we wanted to play a game. She downloaded an app on her phone that allows you to record your voice and play it in reverse. Here’s the game we came up with.

say a word in the recording
play it back in reverse to the next person
The next person says exactly what they hear without thinking

19da0872-340f-4470-bcbc-475282808de9.webm

Every single one was followed up with a Suppa Hot Fire Ahh^hhh_hh reaction by everyone around. They all sounded like complete gibberish, yet came out like the person was talking in a weird accent. Everyone was shocked to hear it was understandable what they were saying reversing their speech.

Seriously give it a try #

Especially if you have kids, it’s so fun to have a small group of people speaking gibberish and out comes something understandable.

Next Day #

The next day I was out with my son and telling him about how cool the game was and how you just gotta hear it to understand it. I was driving so I handed him my phone and said download an app that reverses your voice.

The app store is broken #

He proceeded to download four apps. One required an external log in. The other 3 started rolling 2 minute ads before we were allowed in. It was all shitty bloatware. I’m not sure if my daughter got lucky or they protect kids from getting the same level of garbage I was getting from the app store, but every single one we tried was hot trash.

At this point I’m getting pissed.

I was getting frustrated, this should be the most basic app. Like something 100 people have shipped as a demo for their portfolio. The basics cannot be that complicated and just build on what android already gives you right? I’m getting pissed, I just want a thing to do a thing, it’s simple, right?

just hand me the phone #

GIVE me that thing

After this many attempts, I had him open chatgpt, yes boomer chat, no agents just vanilla ass gippity in the app. I voiced out the following prompt.

Make me a web app that has a big button in the middle to record my voice. I’ll record for approximately 15 to 30 seconds. Once recorded, give me a button to playback or playback in reverse. We’re going to make a game where the next person will try to say exactly what they hear, like a game of telephone. So if you could store the previous clips in a history, like a log, that would be great. But the big easy-to-press buttons are record, play, and reverse. Record should only record while I’m holding the button. When I’m done, it will make a clip. If I messed up, I can delete my clip and try again. This should all run in one single HTML file, local storage, no server.

It’s launched! #

and worked first try^eeee

I probably could have used the gippity sites service, but I just downloaded and immediately ran into permissions. Unless you have https I don’t think you can request the mic. Maybe you need a server and a python -m http.server would have been fine. I downloaded it onto my desktop and ran a just recipe to put a new app in the homelab, and it was up immediately

Reverse Telephone

Record your voice and play it forward or backward with Reverse Telephone. Hold to record, release to save. Audio stays on your device.

Reverse Telephone · voice-reverse.waylonwalker.com

One follow up #

I want to keep this a pure one-shot as much as I can for now, but I wanted the metadata to come out right for when I share/embed.

make sure this app has all the proper meta tags for sharing ask me if you need any questions answered, the images should be shots linked with shots.waylonwalker.com

Personal Software FTW #

This is the age of personal software. For those of you asking If this ai stuff is so good where is the shovelware? here it is. It’s killing the shovelware. You can just make your own thing the moment you need it, ship it, share it, or throw it away. There’s no need to market it or sell it or shove it in anyone’s face, they can just make their own how they want it.

I hear DHH say that eventually languages will be dead and we will be asking in English and machine code for any CPU architecture you want will just pop out. That’s a little wild and far fetched, but we are kinda there. I’ve yet to have an experience like this. A fairly normie experience where I can’t find what I want and wish it into existence and it just pops out. No agents or anything fancy besides maybe the k8s deployment and I just got an app that I was looking for better and faster than we could find one on the app store. Maybe there are 100 like this out there on the web and we just didn’t look, maybe there’s one on the Apple Store you can pay two bucks for, but now this one is mine and I can make it do whatever the heck I want it to do by whispering sweet nothings into the magic genie’s ear

Friday, October 2, 2026

2026-10-02T21:25:29Z

Friday, October 2, 2026

Jack Baty's blog — posts, journal, notes.

baty.net · baty.net

It’s wild how apple went from there will be no app store and everything will be a web app to walled gardens of native apps that lock users in. And not just users but friends of users. Apple was supposed to lean on the web for all of its apps. It was Jobs’s original vision, but it was shortlived for one version before the app store was launched.

The Issue With Everyone Vibe Coding Their Own Software

2026-10-01T13:02:01Z

yes Linus, this is the future super optimized personal software using tokens we buy from the big bois. I feel the same feel you can see on Luke’s face, this is here, there’s no going back. It’s one part absolutely amazing and 2 parts scary shit.

To answer Linus’s question how do you hire someone, when you run all custom software. We stop hiring experts in adobe suite and hiring expert storytellers who have taste, style, and the ability to create something amazing that users want no matter what suite they are in. Someone who understands the craft of making something good, how to feel when it’s wrong, and turn it around.

I can totally see part of this future where someone is making amazing content for Big Beast Time and Linus hires them cause they look good, but turns out Big Beast Time just had a cracked dev that made the greatest way to click together content for their audience that was foolproof and the guy had no idea what he was doing.

I get it, this is not the future that anyone wanted, no one asked for, for every upside, there are so many flaws, but this is now the generation we are working in and we gotta figure out how to make it work.

We use MCP wrong

2026-10-01T12:32:22Z

This, THIS is what I’ve been saying all along. To the point where friends will show me what they are doing and before they can say the word mcp they say, yes this is mcp, I know you don't think it doesn't need to be, but it is, just look at the cool shit. Almost always I end with that coulda been CLI/REST, or nah it’s auth mcp is fINe, followed by woah that’s some cool shit, I’m gonna ask my clanker to do that too.

Bastardica

2026-10-01T12:26:13Z

Bastardica

A type foundry for bastard web fonts.

Bastardica · bastardica.mitpit.com

Oh this is such a sick way to make a cool fontpack of random fonts.

Brain Rot Or The New Normal

2026-10-01T00:00:00Z

I watched through this video earlier of this guy roasting t3.gg and his level of agentic ai brain rot.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZumXpZzDsgo

I really do think this guy had a lot of valid comments about people not being able to look at long form content, not being able to focus long enough to read a page of ai output. Losing our ability to think critically. He points to some of t3.gg’s videos at certain points where Theo says, I’m not even going to read this I’m going to have the agent xyx and move on.

The guy roasting Theo seems like a really smart guy, an academic kind of guy. A guy that really values knowledge. Mad props for this and his ability to avoid the brain rot. I think we have a lot of folks out there that are talking the talk without walking the walk. This guy seems genuine. He seems like he really knows what he is talking about and that he is still reading and writing every line of code himself.

I think we still need people that can carry this torch. It’s going to be a long time until there’s no need to hand code anymore. No need for someone who can hyper-optimize some critical part of the application.

Maybe the new normal #

Thinking practically though. I think we are going to need a lot less of this. What we really need is someone who can translate real business requirements into action. For most people paid to write code the code is still not the key part of the output for the business. It’s an artifact used to drive value to its customers. How many customers do you think care about the code your company writes… Outside of a rare consulting firm or something that the job is to give code to another business it’s ZERO, nada, none.

Even a company like GitHub, I don’t care if the code is beautifully chiseled ruby or the most eye bleeding rust you can imagine. What I care about is uptime, features. Do the features I paid for work? Are the new features something that is going to matter to me? Is the service getting better or worse?

StAk^e_H_Old_eR Val_U_e #

The job is shifting from who can deeply understand the language and framework abstractions that are used by the team to who can move the needle the fastest. Who can ship features they can prove that work, quickly revert mistakes, see production issues, make quick decisions. They know the data we need ahead of time to spot issues, see how many users are being affected, how critical this issue is, and understand what action to take. Do we roll back, fix forward, keep monitoring, do we need to issue comms, to who, where?

I’ll leave you wtih this guy trying to respond to an incident in a hilarious skit.

https://youtube.com/shorts/otkUJ3RPlg8

This Girl Is Getting Good At Bike Riding

2026-09-30T17:47:14Z

Ayla has put in so much effort lately to get over her fears of riding a bike and has gone all the way up to laps around the entire neighborhood.

A Ride Around The Neighborhood

2026-09-30T17:43:34Z

a ride around the neighborhood

Fixing the PR Bottleneck — Matt Pocock, AIHero

2026-09-30T16:07:12Z

The timing of watching this talk is uncanny. Just this week I started building out something that started as a prompt to pull pr data, and as I typed out the prompt in the moment it turned into something that is more like a software factory. I think I have a lot of the general ideas that Matt shares here. Around harnessing up automated review, fix, fix corrections. I need to read through some of his specifics as they seem better and more well honed than what I have. Had I not started just this week I probably would have glazed over during the talk and been like sure sounds good, but having just started this I was pulled in.

One of my favorite things I have in mine so far is really good hotkeys. I can fly through reviews, diffs, approve and merge in just a few keystrokes. This was a huge hurdle in existing tools so much that I put off a lot of sweeping changes I’ve needed to do and I’m cranking through them this week.

The Vomit Prompt

2026-09-30T00:14:58Z

I heard Lex Friedman talk about this method he uses to create Greenfield apps really fast and he claimed worked really well with the latest Gen models at the time. This was during the DHH round 2, 5 hour interview.

Lex asked if DHH uses voice chat at all. DHH claimed it was too uncanny for him. Too weird. He said he still likes to feel like he is chiseling out something by hand. He has interacted with a computer for a quarter of a CENTURY to write open source code by typing into it with a keyboard, and it feels weird to talk to it.

Lex went on to say next time you have a greenfield project, something you want to turn out well and fit your needs, and not have to fuss with it, turn on the mic and just word vomit for 20 minutes. The models do surprisingly well at this.

Today I was feeling the weight of 20 or so PR’s opened up mostly by agents awaiting my review. This whole thing sits on my shoulders. I’m the one that gets the calls when it’s down, and I’m the one with the final say, but gawd it can be a drain to actually give each a good review and get them landed.

So I started a prompt. The initial prompt was going to be a sentence or so…

“write me a script to list all of my prs, prioritize, rank readiness”

This later turned into a 20 minute word vomit that included otel, database, API, sync engine, deterministic checks outside of ci, things like checking version and labeling the pr, pierre diffs (damn these are good) and copilot harness to conduct a preliminary review and auto fixes before I review.

I let that cook in opus 5.5 for about 45 minutes to an hour and went to a meeting, at the end of the meeting I saw it was running in my browser. In absolute shock I had to hold the meeting over for 10 minutes to share with a coworker.

Both of us were in awe at how well this one shot did some things that we tried to get models to do 6 months ago and they just did a terrible job. They were all seemingly bad at using azure and required such a well thought out plan that no one had time to just nail something like this in 20 minutes in the morning.

After using it for a day there are things I’m going to change workflow wise to make it better for me. Things that I would probably simply accept as the truth in a tool, but since I have full access to it I’m going to nitpick it and make it glorious. Because I can.

Rather than bitch about how we have to use shitty ass tools we can just ask for good ones. I know this is not the case everywhere for everything. I know there’s much more complex software. But the bar is being raised and you can just build shit. Heck it seems like all you need to do is ask for it.

Published

Can You Still Say “I Built This” If AI Did the Coding?

Hand painted feature film

Open binaries

Bat Cap

Ghost Cap

Jack-O-Lantern Cap

ascii.rest: animated ascii art for web pages, by @bas3line

What to do while you wait for your agent

The Pi Updates are insane ⟡ Pull Requests are Dead ⟡ Turso Joining Supabase ⌁ Syntax Weekly ⌁

Is Your Org Ready For Agents

Checklist #

Testing #

CI #

CD #

OTEL #

Flexible Infrastructure #

bloatware is dying

Seriously give it a try #

Next Day #

The app store is broken #

just hand me the phone #

It’s launched! #

One follow up #

Personal Software FTW #

Friday, October 2, 2026

The Issue With Everyone Vibe Coding Their Own Software

We use MCP wrong

Bastardica

Brain Rot Or The New Normal

Maybe the new normal #

StAke_H_OldeR Val_U_e #

This Girl Is Getting Good At Bike Riding

A Ride Around The Neighborhood

Fixing the PR Bottleneck — Matt Pocock, AIHero

The Vomit Prompt

StAk^e_H_Old_eR Val_U_e #