Saturday 28
I context engineered a little falling sand cellular automata with my nephew today. Neat project and fun time. If you’re not careful, fire burns everything. Combinatorics show up in the darndest places.
Friday 27
Chris: Would you download a car?
Claude: Absolutely. And I’d pirate the firmware too.
Chris. Hack the planet.
Claude: 🛹
…
Did I just let Omega out of the box?
Thursday 26
Waking up to cool morning air and birdsong is worth living for, even if early morning birdsong is bird swear words and declarations of war. Three cheers for the warsongs heard by non-combattent humans sung of a life of tiny conflict and the convective forces that blow cool air down the canyons at night.
Wednesday 25
- At what level of expertise and involvement does the phrase “There’s no value in having someone on the team whose job is just to talk to Claude” become a cutoff? How big is that iceberg and how many people can it fit?
- Correlary: Product teams that expect the model do understand and cough up somthing real about customers, domains, strategy market fit, estimation, without some sort of boots on the ground and crafting have got to be high. That feels generous. The thing’s an improv partner. You still have to bring something to the scene or we are all eating something more subtly sinister than glass shards.
- Having canyon roads closed to car traffic until May is a long-walk-after-work gift. The right fork of Hobble is fantastic right now.
Tuesday 24
Let’s call it what it is. Someone else’s gastrointestinal distress day on public transport.
- am: If you could just not eat dairy before riding the train that would be greaaate.
- pm: I hate to imagine how much my alvioli have been used to filter gasses generated in someone else’s GI tract. Absolutely rugged.
Monday 23
- Local Stack closed their source today. Floci looks compelling if someone can vet the vibe.
- Gea is your interesting-looking JS framework of the week. I like the idea of familiar-feeling APIs, a compiler, modern toolchains, and a stylish animated background. Can’t wait to see how this concept gets riffed on by the incumbants.
- What if the lore for Diablo was a fantasy-coded AI cautionary tale?
Sunday 22
Sharing smoked salmon is my love language.
Saturday 21
I still love Yoyo’s after all these months. Absense makes the heart grow fonder.
Friday 20
I’m a bit emotional about the passing of Chuck Norris. I was glad to learn that Chuck Norris also enjoyed Chuck Norris jokes. Today we lost an Elder of The Internet. Hoping for his speedy recovery. Get well soon, Chuck Norris.
Thursday 19
My wife is my rock and my brothers are both studs. Thanks for being there for me when I’m struggling and need a stabilizing hand. Hooray for family that are also friends.
Wednesday 18
- Waking up with yesterday’s intractable social problems as the first thing in your head instead of music (the usual) is a leading indicator that change is required. I want my music back.
- After 1 week, I’m still in love with the idea of family stories told interactively through a JRPG engine.
Tuesday 17
- I’ve been thinking a lot about Sun Tsu’s golden bridges and wishing I was better at building them. The heavy bag I got for Christmas has served me well. Looking forward to building and acquiring more diverse tools.
- Designing and building a fine-grained concurrent editing UX into a new web app that is compatible with, interoperable with, and retrofitted into, an existing doc-locking system in a legacy desktop app poses significant challenges.
- So far, the only smells I’ve smelled with RTO have been on the train. Praying for everyone’s improved colon health.
Monday 16
The older I get the more I prefer driving (even long distances) over flying. Something about seeing where I’m going and feeling like I’m in control.
Sunday 15
30 minute recipes you’ve never made actually take 1.5 hours. Kathy is still right after all these years.
Saturday 14
FF5 still hits hard with 8 year olds.
Friday 13
- It’s so very easy to blow $100 on extra tokens in Cursor. Good job, I guess?
- There are leading canaries and there are trailing canaries. Listen to the leading canaries so you don’t suffer with the trailing canaries.
Thursday 12
Surprised about what I’ve been able to build with Claude, Cursor, and probably too many tokens in an impromptu game jam with my 8 year old nephew (we’re calling it Graham Jam Gamie Butt Off 2026). JRPG engine + bones of a game are in a repo here.
Wednesday 11
- “Like a coral reef” is a much nicer way to phrase it than “A Frankenstein job.”
Temporal is finally coming to prime time!
Tuesday 10
Dentists need a better way to socialize with patients than speech when they’ve got their hands in your mouth. Sure. Let me tell you my life story through your fingers.
Monday 9
- Catharsis and catchy social cancer can spring from the same source.
- It seems like all systems are eventually corruptible so long as there’s a desirable external power differential and someone willing to act for it.
- Andre Norton. Her name was Andre Norton. Now to remember the name of the one with the ancient alient installation that was some sort of alien pipe organ…
- From the outset, framework and shared component governance seems like it’s mostly a communication and scheduling problem. How do you ensure that enough is built in the right way so that other teams can use your work predictably?
Sunday 8
I still can’t watch Star Trek AND write code at the same time. Maybe some day. RIP, Mark Hamilton. Thanks for being a calm capable adult when I needed a model.
Saturday 7
Your best friend’s mom probably doesn’t care about the reshaping and compression of Product, UX and FE as a result of developments in AI.
Friday 6
Just because someone requested the feature a month ago (externalizing the improved / degraded handler logic for a dashboard KPI card) doesn’t mean they remember that it’s there, remember that that you delivered it, or remember how to use it. And that’s okay. Happy Friday. :)
Thursday 5
- Building shared in-house UI libraries is challenging on architectural and communication lines. It’s easy to create abstractions that don’t fit other teams’ use cases. Shared components need to be dumb as bricks unless smarts are handled on a framework level. Remember
KpiCard.
- Hold your tongue. Even difficult people might eventually respond to kindness. It’s better to say nothing and give someone else the opportunity to succeed than to express confident doubts, even in private, and then be surprised and humbled by someone’s unexpected good faith.