Wednesday 6
I feel like the dog that chased the squirrel and surprisingly caught the squirrel and now doesn’t know what to do with the squirrel.
Tuesday 5
I don’t have a solution to AI as a burnout-induction machine, especially when it comes to design work. Amazing tools. I need to learn more about burnout so the tools don’t consume me.
Monday 4
I still don’t like getting sick.
Saturday 2
Painting a room seems to take forever.
Friday 1
Waking up early is still hard but being up early, watching the sun rise over Hobble, listening to the birds scream their little war cries, watching the colors change, having a moment to breathe while things are quiet and there’s no pressure to do a thing or talk to someone about a thing or go somewhere do to a thing, makes it worthwhile (even if getting up early is an accident XD).
Thursday 30
Time management is challenging when you’re supporting dev teams with pairing and code review, making architectural choices and writing about them, helping to define product, stay on top of comms, etc. There’s room for discipline here. You know. The hard part.
After all these years it still feels good when “Wrap it in a function, pull the function out of the closure, call the funciton inside the closure, and ReturnType<z.infer<typeof functionThatReturnsYourSchema>> the type for your props” as a solution shakes out of coding in public.
Meeting a new coworker who very quickly becomes a friend is joy. Glad to know you, Michelle.
Wednesday 29
Sometimes listening to my body is wrong, like when it tells me it needs Fruit by the Foot RIGHT NOW.
Sometimes listening to my body is right, like when it says another 4am morning isn’t going to work and I need to sleep RIGHT NOW.
Tuesday 28
The “plan everything and don’t get anything done” trap is very real with AI design tools. It’s super easy to spend your time playing Apples to Apples whack-a-mole with the LLM when I could be making fine tunings by hand in Figma. The volume is amazing, but final shaping is painful.
It’s possible that the endgame of spam text messages is that all numbers are blocked on my phone. No, Sam. I do not care if you are in the area after finishing another roof and want to know if I want a quote. And no, Hazel. I am not interested in an aspirational relationship with you where I use your body and you take my money. We’re all spending a life, whether we think about it or not. It’s tragic that some lives are crafted to be venomously parasitic.
Monday 27
I genuinely love running into the farmers that sell me my produce at the farmer’s market.
I love that the foundation of the American Experiment is built on coexistence and disagreement.
The Dunlop Broadside was printed on the night of the 4th (not the night of the 3rd) with materials that John had on hand.
Sunday 26
Prep and priming is way more fun with Sam and Katie. <3
Saturday 25
Everything leading up to painting takes more time than painting.
Friday 24
I still have times when I bounce off the walls and can’t force myself to sit in my chair and focus.
Thursday 23
I don’t have a working strategy for AI thought alignment beyond “read every last little bit of output and correct and correct and correct until my language model matches its languages model.” This is slow and error prone and easy to get sloppy on, skip steps, skim, etc.
I can see two problems here.
- The LLM’s firehose volume is outpaces my ability to consume it and align with it, and hallucination spray is hard to mop up in realtime.
- The rate of learning required on my end, assuming 1 is reasonably handled, is tremendous and can be exhausting.
There’s value in writing about this, working through my thoughts.
Wednesday 22
Working with Claude Design until my tokens ran out kind of blew my mind yesterday. I’m looking forward to giving Open CoDesign a shot with local models. Looking forward to picking up a Mac Studio so I can stop shoveling money into Anthropic.
Tuesday 21
I’d rather have another kidney stone than commute 4 hours to sit on Zoom meetings in the office.
Claude Design is wild.
Monday 20
Three hour meetings empty your well.
Sunday 19
The Burgette is real, shrinks most length-wise when cooked, and can be flipped with 2 spatulas.
Saturday 18
The Burgette (it came to me in a dream) has been successfully incepted into Justin and now it seems like I finally have to make it.
Friday 17
I would rather do many things than pass another kidney stone. So far the pain list goes:
- Muscle spasms across my back for a week.
- Broken arm.
- Passing a kidney stone.
- Everything else I’ve experienced (root canals, etc).
Thursday 16
It’s like pulling teeth to get our product team to wireframe. We’re getting there.
Stand and defend can feel uncomfortable to the people around you, even when you’re defending. Hilarie, Stephen, Alex, love you all.
Wednesday 15
Someday MCP with an agent as glue between will feel mundane in meetings, but for now it still feels like science fiction. Jira tickets as a categorized data source with description summarization projected across a handful of carefully selected metadata fields for a group card sorting discovery round is neat.
Tuesday 14
Claude’s web UI as a prototyping tool is great when you’re starting a thing and when the prototype stays small. Research tasks are really handy for a lot of product and UX tasks that involve summary and sunthesis (think IA). Long lived or very large prototypes become difficult to maintain after ~8,000 linesand very slow to reason through and extend after ~10,000 lines. Finding another way to work a complex prototype as you validate that’s secure, has good tooling, and is easy enough that you can send a link to a user and it “just works” is a tool that I would love to have and might wind up building.
Feeling grateful. Thanks for reading my RFC and taking it seriously, Josh. It means a lot to be heard.
Monday 13
If I sit here
||-|-| |-|-||
||x|-| |-|-||
and you sit here
||-|o| |-|-||
||x|-| |-|-||
then the next person sits here
||-|o| |-|-||
||x|o| |-|-||
and the last person will have to climb over you to sit here
||o|o| |-|-||
||x|o| |-|-||
which I’m pretty sure that means I win.
Also.
It’s a little weird to be no longer a teenager and still groove to Teenage Dirtbag by Wheetus. Feels a little disingenous.
Sunday 12
Definitely validate with people who haven’t seen the thing before. First impressions are pure gold.
Saturday 11
Self identification of abstract skills that one has expertise in, that aren’t abstracted so far back as to be too general to be valuable, and whose application elsewhere is categorically correct enough as to be able to be useful in The Next Thing at The Next Organization, without succumbing to Expert Syndrome, is a challenge. Even when you’re doing it for someone else. Especially whe you are doing it on the fly without deep understanding of the domain. Happy birthday, sister! Thanks for engaging and not just sending me to bed early without dinner. XD
Friday 10
Meritocritous golden bridges of retreat after I cleaned the muck off my boot from how far it got up there feel good. I’m still losing the war if I stay, but today the product will be better because expectations are crystal clear and contributors are engaged.
Thursday 9
- One 24 hours coding marathon later and I have a slightly rough MVP replacement for email communication and one person orchestrating All The Things for Tool Club. https://github.com/cbuchert/tool-club
- Leading a team in the dissection and analysis of a big legacy feature that’s had new fields and buttons and tabs and field groups duct taped onto it for decades with the goal of establishing IA and then being able to slice through it across a handful of meaningful vectors is deeply rewarding, and working with an LLM agent with Figma MCP in a Fig Jam whiteboard collaboratively as a team feels like magic. I wonder what happens when everyone has their own agent with MCP making God Mode edits to the board as we dicuss and collect together? Looking forward to building tooling between the agent and the MCP for better physical arrangement, etc. Neat stuff.
Wednesday 8
Your embedded chatbot is probably making your FE bundle significantly bigger because its ability to render any chart you want requires you to ship the whole charting library, instead of treeshaking and bundling just the parts you’re using. If the chatbots are going to continue to save us all, it would be smart to find a way to break charting libraries up into pieces that can be downloaded incrementally when responses need them.
This on its own isn’t too bad, but figuring out how to do it and also not give the stochastic parrot the ability to sideload and run arbitrary code seems intractable.
Tuesday 7
- I can still be up and out the door in under 5 minutes. It’s no wonder that High School started rough every day.
- Asking a senior PM what the strategic goals the company expects him to achieve and being told “I don’t know” is a confidence destroyer.
- Claude as a UX designer / researcher partner is awesome. Today was the first day that Claude was essentially another person on the team, collaborating with us in a meeting. I primed it to do an IA study and dropped 17 screenshots of an interface that has accumulated features over the past 20 years. It coughed up a color-coded, metadata rich, card sorting study in a FigJam board. Next steps are to have it validate each piece against Java Swing UI code and for the team to sift through the 339 output cards and ensure they’re real (and we didn’t miss anything).
- MCP feels good.
Monday 6
- UTA employees all hang out together at the back of the train.
- Someone just always has to fart on the train, don’t they?
Sunday 5
After all these years I still fight sleep sometimes. Even though I’m an adult. Even though Monday morning is coming. Even though the subset of YouTube’s infinite content that is worth watching seems smaller than what can be consumed between the hours of midnight and 6 am.
Saturday 4
- Sometimes it’s more important to talk at the coffee shop than to work at the coffee shop. Might have burned some Mennonite ears this morning though.
- I’m a conseravative adopter, but I might have been persuaded to buy a Mac Studio, run local models, and drop my subscriptions to All The Things.
- It turns out that data migration during new Macbook setup can fail on the source side and hork your whole installation, essentially bricking the laptop. Thank goodness for a return policy. Yikes.
- Maybe you have strong negative feelings about New Wavers. Maybe the whole Into the Gap album by Thompson Twins is too mainstream and colonial for your discerning intellectual tastes. I sincerely wish I could be more sincere and earnest and less jaded and post-that’s-what-she-said, like I feel when I listen to Hold Me Now. If we have to construct meaning, that seems like a pretty nice edit.
Friday 3
As a species, we’re still smaller than the weather.
Thursday 2
- Diffing changes in medium to large text artifacts in Claude while making edits conversationally still feels unsolved without external tooling. The firehose puts out a high volume and finding word changes quickly in 100+ lines has been challenging. Maybe there’s a skill that could be built for this?
- Conversations, notes, blog posts => RFC => Engineering Handoff Doc => code feels pretty good.
Wednesday 1
Longform conversation with Claude primed with a rigorously crafted UX Designer system prompt that summarizes ideas and decisions with a clickable prototype is my current favorite way to work through mundane UX. Being able to navigate the design conceptually and architecturally and by use case and backed by data is such a natural fit. When interface elements get complex it seems to fall apart (lookin’ at you, complex calendar implementations and bespoke data visualizations). In those cases Figma is pure gold.
A year and change ago I was asked to put together a presentation on where UX was headed with AI tooling. After some digging and some soul searching, I proposed two directions:
- Current design tools continue to be used by serious teams doing serious work because the value of design work culminates in high fidelity mockup deliverables and the process (hypothesis, research, design, validate) doesn’t fundamentally change. Expect design tools like Figma to modernize.
- Interactive prototypes are built agentically in response to business requirements, product specification, product research, UX research, user vibe, etc. Someone has the difficult task of convincing Product that their generated interactive prototype is a design doc and not production code. The prototype becomes the engineering deliverable.
For my personal project use cases, I think that #2 is winning.
Tuesday 31
Feels good when an RFC is well constructed and gets taken seriously. Three cheers for responsible NPM package governance.
Monday 30
Dear America.
I know the concept of public good is strange to you. I’m going to tell you something hard. Dairy in the morning before your train ride is bad. Bad bad bad. Stop it. Just stop. We all smell it. It was totally you.
Sincerely,
Chris.
Sunday 29
Designing error handling UX for functionality that requires Internet access (address autocomplete, in this case) for local-first mobile apps is challenging. Time to start poking around, see if other people have cracked this particular nut before and what their use cases were.
Local-first doesn’t seem to require any real design flexibility beyond what you’d expect from a typical web app so long as you’re working with your own data. Extending the app to include responsive data and functionality from external sources seems like it is a fundamental challenge to the “it feels immediate” local first model though. The obvious solution seems to be “don’t let the user do a thing that requires an Internet connection if they don’t have a connection.” Maybe that’s just the default fallback UX? Feels bad. It’s hard to queue and simulate something that is big enough that you’re willing to let someone else do it (like validating an address).
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.